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A COLLEGE FETICH 



CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, JR. 



KTefa Eiitton, 



WITH SUPPLEMENTARY MATTER. 



UNIVERSITY PRESS: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE. 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 



AN ADDRESS 

DELIVERED BEFORE 

€Ije ^atfcarD Chapter 

OF THE 

FRATERNITY OF THE PHI BETA KAPPA, 

IN SANDERS THEATRE, CAMBRIDGE, 
June 28, 1883. 



By CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, Jr. 



Elnrlj JSUitfon, 

WITH SUPPLEMENTARY MATTER. 

BOSTON: 
LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS. 

NEW YORK: 
CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM. 

1884. 



/ 



I) C 10 1| 

-As* .s* 



Copyright, 1883, 
By C. F. Adams, Jr. 



PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON AND SON. 
UNIVERSITY PRESS. 



ADDRESS. 



I AM here to-day for a purpose. After no little hesitation 
I accepted the invitation to address your Society, simply 
because I had something which I much wanted to say; and 
this seemed to me the best possible place, and this the most 
appropriate occasion, for saying it. My message, if such I 
may venture to call it, is in nowise sensational. On the con- 
trary, it partakes, I fear, rather of the commonplace. Such 
being the case, I shall give it the most direct utterance of 
which I am capable. 

It is twenty-seven years since the class of which I was a 
member was graduated from this college. To-day I have come 
back here to take, for the first time, an active part of any 
prominence in the exercises of its Commencement week. I 
have come back, as what we are pleased to term an educated 
man, to speak to educated men ; a literary man, as literary 
men go, I have undertaken to address a literary society; a 
man who has, in any event, led an active, changeable, bustling 
life, I am to say what I have to say to men, not all of whom 
have led similar lives. It is easy to imagine one who had 
contended in the classic games returning, after they were over, 
to the gymnasium in which he had been trained. It would 
not greatly matter whether he had acquitted himself well or ill 
in the arena, — whether he had come back crowned with vie- 



4 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

tory or broken by defeat : in the full light of his experience of 
the struggle, he would be disposed to look over the old para- 
phernalia, and recall the familiar exercises, passing judgment 
upon them. Tested by hard, actual results, was the theory of 
his training correct ; were the appliances of the gymnasium 
good ; did what he got there contribute to his victory, or had 
it led to his defeat? Taken altogether, was he strengthened, 
or had he been emasculated by his gymnasium course? The 
college was our gymnasium. It is now the gymnasium of our 
children. Thirty years after graduation a man has either won 
or lost the game. Winner or loser, looking back through the 
medium of that thirty years of hard experience, how do we 
see the college now? 

It would be strange, indeed, if from this point of view we 
regarded it, its theories and its methods, with either unmixed 
approval or unmixed condemnation. I cannot deny that the 
Cambridge of the sixth decennium of the century, as Thack- 
eray would have phrased it, was in many respects a pleasant 
place. There were good things about it. By the student who 
understood himself, and knew what he wanted, much might 
here be learned ; while for most of us the requirements were 
not excessive. We of the average majority did not under- 
stand ourselves, or know what we wanted : the average man of 
the majority rarely does. And so for us the college course, 
instead of being a time of preparation for the hard work of 
life, was a pleasant sort of vacation rather, before that work 
began. We so regarded it. I should be very sorry not to 
have enjoyed that vacation. I am glad that I came here, and 
glad that I took my degree. But as a training-place for youth 
to enable them to engage to advantage in the struggle of life, 
— to fit them to hold their own in it, and to carry off the 
prizes, — I must in all honesty say, that, looking back through 
the years, and recalling the requirements and methods of the 
ancient institution, I am unable to speak of it with all the re- 
spect I could wish. Such training as I got, useful for the 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 5 

struggle, I got after, instead of before graduation, and it came 
hard ; while I never have been able — and now, no matter how 
long I may live, I never shall be able — to overcome some great 
disadvantages which, the superstitions and wrong theories and 
worse practices of my Alma Mater inflicted upon me. And 
not on me alone. The same may be said of my contem- 
poraries, as I have observed them in success and failure. 
What was true in this respect of the college of thirty years 
ago is, I apprehend, at least partially true of the college of 
to-day; and it is true not only of Cambridge, but of other 
colleges, and of them quite as much as of Cambridge. They 
fail properly to fit their graduates for the work they have to 
do in the life that awaits them. 

This is harsh language to apply to one's nursing mother, 
and it calls for an explanation. That explanation I shall now 
try to give. I have said that the college of thirty years ago 
did not fit its graduates for the work they had. to do in the 
actual life which awaited them. Let us consider for a moment 
what that life has been, and then we will pass to the prepara- 
tion we received for it. When the men of my time graduated, 
Franklin Pierce was President, the war in the Crimea was just 
over, and three years were yet to pass before Solferino would 
be fought. No united Germany and no united Italy existed. 
The railroad and the telegraph were in their infancy ; neither 
nitro-glycerine nor the telephone had been discovered. The 
years since then have been fairly crammed with events. A 
new world has come into existence, and a world wholly unlike 
that of our fathers, — unlike it in peace and unlike it in war. 
It is a world of great intellectual quickening, which has ex- 
tended until it now touches a vastly larger number of men, in 
many more countries, than it ever touched before. Not only 
have the nations been rudely shaken up, but they have been 
drawn together. Interdependent thought has been carried on, 
interacting agencies have been at work in widely separated 
countries and different tongues. The solidarity of the peo- 



6 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

pies has been developed. Old professions have lost their 
prominence ; new professions have arisen. Science has ex- 
tended its domains, and superseded authority with bewildering 
rapidity. The artificial barriers — national, political, social, 
economical, religious, intellectual — have given way in every 
direction, and the civilized races of the world are becoming 
one people, even if a discordant and quarrelsome people. We 
all of us live more in the present and less in the past than we 
did thirty years ago, — much less in the past and much more 
in the present than those who preceded us did fifty years 
ago. The world as it is may be a very bad and a very vulgar 
world, — insincere, democratic, disrespectful, dangerous, and 
altogether hopeless. I do not think it is ; but with that thesis 
I have, here and now, nothing to do. However bad and hope- 
less, it is nevertheless the world in which our lot was cast, and 
in which we have had to live, — a bustling, active, nervous 
world, and one very hard to keep up with. This much all 
will admit; while I think I may further add, that its most 
marked characteristic has been an intense mental and physical 
activity, which, working simultaneously in many tongues, has 
attempted much and questioned all things. 

Now as respects the college preparation we received to fit 
us to take part in this world's debate. As one goes on in life, 
especially in modern life, a few conclusions are hammered into 
us by the hard logic of facts. Among those conclusions, I 
think I may, without much fear of contradiction, enumerate 
. such practical, common-sense and commonplace precepts as 
that superficiality is dangerous, as well as contemptible, in that 
it is apt to invite defeat ; or, again, that what is worth doing at 
all is worth doing well; or, third, that when one is given 
work to do, it is well to prepare one's self for that specific work, 
and not to occupy one's time in acquiring information, no 
matter how innocent or elegant, or generally useful, which has 
no probable bearing on that work; or, finally, — and this I 
regard as the greatest of all practical precepts, — that every man 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 7 

should in life master some one thing, be it great or be it small, 
so that thereon he may be the highest living authority : that 
one thing he should know thoroughly. 

How did Harvard College prepare me, and my ninety-two 
classmates of the year 1856, for our work in a life in which 
we have had these homely precepts brought close to us? In 
answering the question it is not altogether easy to preserve 
one's gravity. The college fitted us for this active, bustling, 
hard-hitting, many-tongued world, caring nothing for authority 
and little for the past, but full of its living thought and living 
issues, in dealing with which there was no man who did not 
stand in pressing and constant need of every possible prepara- 
tion as respects knowledge and exactitude and thoroughness, 
— the poor old college prepared us to play our parts in this 
world by compelling us, directly and indirectly, to devote the 
best part of our school lives to acquiring a confessedly super- 
ficial knowledge of two dead languages. 

In regard to the theory of what we call a liberal education, 
there is, as I understand it, not much room for difference of 
opinion. There are certain fundamental requirements, without 
a thorough mastery of which no one can pursue a specialty to 
advantage. Upon these common fundamentals are grafted 
the specialties, — the students' electives, as we call them. The 
man is simply mad, who in these days takes all knowledge for 
his province. He who professes to do so can only mean 
that he proposes, in so far as in him lies, to reduce super- 
ficiality to a science. 

Such is the theory. Now what is the practice? Thirty 
years ago, as for three centuries before, Greek and Latin were 
the fundamentals. The grammatical study of two dead lan- 
guages was the basis of all liberal education. It is still its 
basis. But, following the theory out, I think all will admit 
that, as respects the fundamentals, the college training should 
be compulsory and severe. It should extend through the 
whole course. No one ought to become a Bachelor of Arts 



8 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

until, upon these fundamentals, he had passed an examination, 
the scope and thoroughness of which should set at defiance 
what is perfectly well defined as the science of cramming. 
Could the graduates of my time have passed such an exami- 
nation in Latin and Greek? If they could have done that, I 
should now see a reason in the course pursued with us. When 
we were graduated, we should have acquired a training, such 
as it was ; it would have amounted to something ; and, hav- 
ing a bearing on the future, it would have been of use in it. 
But it never was for a moment assumed that we could have 
passed any such examination. In justice to all, I must admit 
that no self-deception was indulged in on this point. Not only 
was the knowledge of our theoretical fundamentals to the last 
degree superficial, but nothing better was expected. The re- 
quirements spoke for themselves; and the subsequent exam- 
inations never could have deceived any one who had a proper 
conception of what real knowledge was. 

But in pursuing Greek and Latin we had ignored our mother 
tongue. We were no more competent to pass a really search- 
ing examination in English literature and English composi- 
tion than in the languages and literature of Greece and Rome. 
We were college graduates ; and yet how many of us could 
follow out a line of sustained, close thought, expressing our- 
selves in clear, concise terms? The faculty of doing this should 
result from a mastery of well selected fundamentals. The 
difficulty was that the fundamentals were not well selected, and 
they had never been mastered. They had become a tradition. 
They were studied no longer as a means, but as an end, — the 
end being to get into college. Accordingly, thirty years ago 
there was no real living basis of a Harvard education. Honest, 
solid foundations were not laid. The superstructure, such as it 
was, rested upon an empty formula. 

The reason of all this I could not understand then, though it 
is clear enough to me now. I take it to be simply this : The 
classic tongues were far more remote from our world than they 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 9 

had been from the world our fathers lived in. They are much 
more remote from the world of to-day than they were from 
the world of thirty years ago. The human mind, outside of 
the cloisters, is occupied with other and more pressing things. 
Especially is it occupied with a class of thoughts — scientific 
thoughts — which do not find their nutriment in the remote 
past. They are. not in sympathy with it. Accordingly, the 
world turns more and more from the classics to those other and 
living sources, in which alone it finds what it seeks. Students 
come to college from the hearthstones of the modern world. 
They have been brought up in the new atmosphere. They are 
consequently more and more disposed to regard the dead 
languages as a mere requirement to college admission. This 
reacts upon the institution. The college does not change, — 
there is no conservatism I have ever met, so hard, so unrea- 
soning, so impenetrable, as the conservatism of professional 
educators about their methods, — the college does not change; 
it only accepts the situation. The routine goes on, but super- 
ficiality is accepted as of course ; and so thirty years ago, as 
now, a surface acquaintance with two dead languages was the 
chief requirement for admission to Harvard ; and to acquiring 
it, years of school life were devoted. 

Nor in my time did the mischief end here. On the contrary, 
it began here. As a slipshod method of training was accepted 
in those studies to which the greatest prominence was given, 
the same method was accepted in other studies. The whole 
standard was lowered. Thirty years ago — I say it after a care- 
ful search through my memory — thoroughness of training in 
any real-life sense of the term was unknown in those branches 
of college education with which I came in contact. Every- 
thing was taught as Latin and Greek were taught. Even now, 
I do not see how I could have got solid, exhaustive teaching in 
the class-room, even if I had known enough to want it. A 
limp superficiality was all pervasive. To the best of my recol- 
lection the idea of hard thoroughness was not there. It may 
be there now. I hope it is. 



IO A COLLEGE FETICH. 

And here let me define my position on several points, so that 
I shall be misunderstood only by such as wilfully misunder- 
stand, in order to misrepresent. With such I hold no argu- 
ment. In the first place I desire to say that I am no believer 
in that narrow scientific . and technological training which now 
and again we hear extolled. A practical, and too often a mere 
vulgar, money-making utility seems to be its natural outcome. 
On the contrary, the whole experience and observation of my 
life lead me to look with greater admiration, and an envy ever 
increasing, on the broadened culture which is the true end and 
aim of the University. On this point I cannot be too explicit; 
for I should be sorry indeed if anything I might utter were 
construed into an argument against the most liberal education. 
There is a considerable period in every man's life, when the 
best thing he can do is to let his mind soak and tan in the 
vats of literature. The atmosphere of a university is breathed 
into the student's system, — it enters by the very pores. But, 
just as all roads lead to Rome, so I hold there may be a modern 
road as well as the classic avenue to the goal of a true liberal 
education. I object to no man's causing his children to ap- 
proach that goal by the old, the time-honored entrance. On 
the contrary I will admit that, for those who travel it well, it is 
the best entrance. But I do ask that the modern entrance 
should not be closed. Vested interests always look upon a 
claim for simple recognition as a covert attack on their very 
existence, and the advocates of an exclusively classic college- 
education are quick to interpret a desire for modern learning, 
as a covert attack on dead learning. I have no wish to attack 
it, except in its spirit of selfish exclusiveness. I do challenge 
the right of the classicist to longer say that by his path, and 
by his path only, shall the University be approached. I would 
not narrow the basis of liberal education ; I would broaden 
it. No longer content with classic sources, I would have the 
University seek fresh inspiration at the fountains of living 
thought; for Goethe I hold to be the equal of Sophocles, and 



A COLLEGE FETICH. II 

# 
I prefer the philosophy of Montaigne to what seem to me 
the platitudes of Cicero. 

Neither, though venturing on these comparisons, have I any- 
light or disrespectful word to utter of the study of Latin or of 
Greek, much less of the classic literatures. While recognizing 
fully the benefit to be derived from a severe training in these 
mother tongues, I fully appreciate the pleasure those must have 
who enjoy an easy familiarity with the authors who yet live in 
them. No one admires — I am not prepared to admit that any 
one can admire — more than I the subtile, indescribable fineness, 
both of thought and diction, which a thorough classical educa- 
tion gives to the scholar. Mr. Gladstone is, as Macaulay was, 
a striking case in point. As much as any one I note and de- 
plore the absence of this literary Tower-stamp in the writings 
and utterances of many of our own authors and public men. 
But its absence is not so deplorable as that display of cheap 
learning which made the American oration of thirty and fifty 
years ago a national humiliation. Even in its best form it 
was bedizened with classic tinsel which bespoke the vanity 
of the half-taught scholar. We no longer admire that sort of 
thing. But among men of my own generation I do both ad- 
mire and envy those who I am told make it a daily rule to 
read a little of Homer or Thucydides, of Horace or Tacitus. 
I wish I could do the same ; and yet I must frankly say I 
should not do it if I could. Life after all is limited, and I 
belong enough to the present to feel satisfied that I could 
employ that little time each day both more enjoyably and 
more profitably if I should devote it to keeping pace with 
modern thought, as it finds expression even in the ephemeral 
pages of the despised review. Do what he will, no man can 
keep pace with that wonderful modern thought ; and if I must 
choose, — and choose I must, — I would rather learn some- 
thing daily from the living who are to perish, than daily muse 
"with the immortal dead. Yet for the purpose of my argu- 
ment I do not for a moment dispute the superiority — I am 



12 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

ready to say the hopeless, the unattainable superiority — of 
the classic masterpieces. They are sealed books to me, as they 
are to at least nineteen out of twenty of the graduates of our 
colleges ; and we can neither affirm nor deny that in them, and 
in them alone, are to be found the choicest thoughts of the 
human mind and the most perfect forms of human speech. 

All that has nothing to do with the question. We are not 
living in any ideal world. We are living in this world of to- 
day ; and it is the business of the college to fit men for it. 
Does she do it? As I have said, my own experience of thirty 
years ago tells me that she did not do it then. The facts 
being much the same, I do not see how she can do it now. It 
seems to me she starts from a radically wrong basis. It is, 
to use plain language, a basis of fetich worship, in which the 
real and practical is systematically sacrificed to the ideal and 
theoretical. 

To-day, whether I want to or not, I must speak from indi- 
vidual experience. Indeed, I have no other ground on which 
to stand. I am not a scholar ; I am not an educator ; I am 
not a philosopher; but I submit that in educational matters 
individual, practical experience is entitled to some weight. 
Not one man in ten thousand can contribute anything to this 
discussion in the way of more profound views or deeper in- 
sight. Yet any concrete, actual experience, if it be only sim- 
ply and directly told, may prove a contribution of value, and 
that contribution we all can bring. An average college gra- 
duate, I am here to subject the college theories to the practical 
test of an experience in the tussle of life. Recurring to the 
simile with which I began, the wrestler in the games is back at 
the gymnasium. If he is to talk to any good purpose he must 
talk of himself, and how he fared in the struggle. It is he who 
speaks. 

I was fitted for college in the usual way. I went to the Latin 
School ; I learned the two grammars by heart ; at length I 
could even puzzle out the simpler classic writings with the aid 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 1 3 

i 

of a lexicon, and apply more or less correctly the rules of con- 
struction. This, and the other rudiments of what we are 
pleased to call a liberal education, took five years of my time. 
I was fortunately fond of reading, and so learned English 
myself, and with some thoroughness. I say fortunately, for in 
our preparatory curriculum no place was found for English ; 
being a modern language, it was thought not worth studying, 
— as our examination papers conclusively showed. We turned 
English into bad enough Greek, bat our thoughts were ex- 
pressed in even more abominable English. I then went to col- 
lege, — to Harvard. I have already spoken of the standard of 
instruction, so far as thoroughness was concerned, then pre- 
vailing here. Presently I was graduated, and passed some 
years in the study of the law. Thus far, as you will see, my 
course was thoroughly correct. It was the course pursued by 
a large proportion of all graduates then, and the course pur- 
sued by more than a third of them now. Then the War of the 
Rebellion came, and swept me out of a lawyer's office into a 
cavalry saddle. Let me say, in passing, that I have always felt 
under deep personal obligation to the War of the Rebellion. 
Returning presently to civil life, and not taking kindly to my 
profession, I endeav®red to strike out a new path, and fastened 
myself, not, as Mr. Emerson recommends, to a star, but to the 
locomotive-engine. I made for myself what might perhaps be 
called a specialty in connection with the development of the 
railroad system. I do not hesitate to say that I have been 
incapacitated from properly developing my specialty, by the 
sins of omission and commission incident to my college train- 
ing. The mischief is done, and so far as I am concerned is 
irreparable. I am only one more sacrifice to the fetich. But 
I do not propose to be a silent sacrifice. I am here to-day to 
put the responsibility for my failure, so far as I have failed, 
where I think it belongs, — at the door of my preparatory and 
college education. 

Nor has that incapacity, and the consequent failure to which 



14 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

I have referred, been a mere thing of imagination or sentiment. 
On the contrary, it has been not only matter-of-fact and real, 
but to the last degree humiliating. I have not, in following 
out my specialty, had at my command — nor has it been in my 
power, placed as I was, to acquire — the ordinary tools which 
an educated man must have to enable him to work to advantage 
on the developing problems of modern, scientific life. But on 
this point I feel that I can, with few words, safely make my 
appeal to the members of this Society. 

Many of you are scientific men; others are literary men-; 
some are professional men. I believe, from your own personal 
experience, you will bear me out when I say that, with a single 
exception, there is no modern scientific study which can be 
thoroughly pursued in any one living language, even with the 
assistance of all the dead languages that ever were spoken. 
The researches in the dead languages are indeed carried on 
through the medium of several living languages. I have ad- 
mitted there is one exception to this rule. That exception is 
the law. Lawyers alone, I believe, join with our statesmen in 
caring nothing for " abroad." Except in its more elevated and 
theoretical branches, which rarely find their way into our courts, 
the law is a purely local pursuit. Those who follow it may 
grow gray in active practice, and yet never have occasion to 
consult a work in any language but their own. It is not so 
with medicine or theology or science or art, in any of their 
numerous branches, or with government, or political economy, 
or with any other of the whole long list. With the exception 
of law, I think I might safely challenge any one of you to name 
a single modern calling, either learned or scientific, in which a 
worker who is unable to read and write and speak at least Ger- 
man and French, does not stand at a great and always recurring 
disadvantage. He is without the essential tools of his trade. 

The modern languages are thus the avenues to modern life 
and living thought. Under these circumstances, what was the 
position of the college towards them thirty years ago ? What 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 1 5 

is its position to-day? It intervened, and practically said then 
that its graduates should not acquire those languages at that 
period when only they could be acquired perfectly and with 
ease. It occupies the same position still. It did and does 
this none the less effectually because indirectly. The thing 
came about, as it still comes about, in this way: The col- 
lege fixes the requirements for admission to its course. The 
schools and the academies adapt themselves to those require- 
ments. The business of those preparatory schools is to get 
the boys through their examinations, not as a means, but as 
an end. They are therefore all organized on one plan. To 
that plan there is no exception ; nor practically can there be 
any exception. The requirements for admission are such that 
the labor of preparation occupies fully the boy's study hours. 
He is not overworked, perhaps, but when his tasks are done he 
has no more leisure than is good for play ; and you cannot take 
a healthy boy the moment he leaves school and set him down 
before tutors in German and French. If you do, he will soon 
cease to be a healthy boy ; and he will not learn German or 
French. Over-education is 'a crime against youth. But Har- 
vard College says : " We require such and such things for ad- 
mission to our course." First and most emphasized among 
them are Latin and Greek. The academies accordingly teach 
Latin and Greek ; and they teach it in the way to secure admis- 
sion to the college. Hence, because of this action of the col- 
lege, the schools do not exist in this country in which my 
children can learn what my experience tells me it is all essen- 
tial they should know. They cannot both be fitted for college 
and taught the modern languages. And when I say " taught 
the modern languages," I mean taught them in the world's 
sense of the word, and not in the college sense of it, as prac- 
tised both in my time and now. And here let me not be mis- 
understood, and confronted with examination papers. I am 
talking of really knowing something. I do not want my 
children to get a smattering knowledge of French and of Ger- 



1 6 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

man, such a knowledge as was and now is given to boys of 
Latin and Greek ; but I do want them to be taught to write 
and to speak those languages, as well as to read them, — in a 
word, so to master them that they will thereafter be tools al- 
ways ready to the hand. This requires labor. It is a thing 
which cannot be picked up by the wayside, except in the 
countries where the languages are spoken. If academies in 
America are to instruct in this way, they must devote them- 
selves to it. But the college requires all that they can well 
undertake 'to do. The college absolutely insists on Latin and 
Greek. 

Latin I will not stop to contend over. That is a small mat- 
ter. Not only is it a comparatively simple language, but, apart 
from its literature, — for which I cannot myself profess to have 
any great admiration, — it has its modern uses. Not only is it 
directly the mother tongue of all southwestern Europe, but it 
has by common consent been adopted in scientific nomencla- 
ture. Hence, there are reasons why the educated man should 
have at least an elementary knowledge of Latin. • That knowl- 
edge also can be acquired with no great degree of labor. To 
master the language would be another matter ; but in these 
days few think of mastering it. How many students during 
the last thirty years have graduated from Harvard who could 
read Horace and Tacitus and Juvenal, as numbers now read 
Goethe and Mommsen and Heine? If there have been ten, I 
do not believe there have been a score. This it is to acquire 
a language ! A knowledge of its rudiments is a wholly different 
thing; and with a knowledge of the rudiments of Latin as a 
requirement for admission to college I am not here to quarrel. 
Not so Greek. The study of Greek, and I speak from the un- 
mistakable result of my own individual experience in active 
life, as well as from that of a long-continued family experience 
which I shall presently give, — the study of Greek in the way 
it is traditionally insisted upon, as the chief requirement to en- 
tering college', is a positive educational wrong. It has already 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 1 7 

wrought great individual and general injury, and is now work- 
ing it. It has been productive of no compensating advantage. 
It is a superstition. 

But before going further I wish to emphasize the limitations 
under which I make this statement. I would not be misun- 
derstood. I am speaking not at all of Greek really studied 
and lovingly learned. Of that there cannot well be two 
opinions. I have already said that it is the basis of the finest 
scholarship. I have in mind only the Greek traditionally 
insisted upon as the chief requirement to entering College, — 
the Greek learned under compulsion by nine men at least out 
of each ten who are graduated. It is that quarter-acquired 
knowledge, and that only, of which I insist that it is a super- 
stition, and educational wrong. Nor can it ever be anything 
else. It is a mere penalty on going to college. 

I am told that when thoroughly studied Greek becomes a 
language delightfully easy to learn. I do not know how this 
may be ; but I do know that when learned as a college require- 
ment it is most difficult, — far more difficult than Latin. 
Unlike Latin, also, Greek, partially acquired, has no modern 
uses. Not only is it a dead tongue, but it bears no immediate 
relation to any living speech or literature of value. Like all 
rich dialects, it is full of anomalies ; and accordingly its 
grammar is the delight of grammarians, and the despair of 
every one else. When I was fitted for college, the study of 
Greek took up at least one half of the last three years devoted 
to active preparation. In memory it looms up now, through 
the long vista of years, as the one gigantic nightmare of youth, 
— and no more profitable than nightmares are wont to be. 
Other school-day tasks sink into insignificance beside it. 
When we entered college we had all of us the merest super- 
ficial knowledge of the language,' — a knowledge measured by 
the ability to read at sight a portion of Xenophon, a little of 
Herodotus, and a book or two of the Iliad. It was just enough 
to enable us to meet the requirements of the examination. In 



1 8 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

all these respects, my inquiries lead me to conclude that what 
was true then is even more true now. In the vast majority of 
cases, this study of Greek was looked upon by parent and stu- 
dent as a mere college requirement ; and the instructor taught 
it as such. It was never supposed for an instant that it would 
be followed up. On the contrary, if it was thought of at all, 
instead of rather taken as a matter of course, it was thought of 
very much as a similar amount of physical exercise with dumb- 
bells or parallel-bars might be thought of, — as a thing to be 
done as best it might, and there an end. As soon as possible 
after entering college the study was abandoned forever, and the 
little that had been acquired faded rapidly away from the 
average student's mind. I have now forgotten the Greek 
alphabet, and I cannot read all the Greek characters if I 
open my Homer. Such has been the be : all and the end-all 
of the tremendous labor of my schooldays. 

But I now come to what in plain language I cannot but call 
the educational cant of this subject. I am told that I ignore 
the severe intellectual training I got in learning the Greek 
grammar, and in subsequently applying its rules; that my 
memory then received an education which, turned since to 
other matters, has proved invaluable to me ; that accumu- 
lated experience shows that this training can be got equally 
well in no other way; that, beyond all this, even my slight 
contact with the Greek masterpieces has left with me a subtile 
but unmistakable residuum, impalpable perhaps, but still there, 
and very precious ; that, in a word, I am what is called an 
educated man, which, but for my early contact with Greek, I 
would not be. 

It was Dr. Johnson, I believe, who once said, " Let us free 
our minds from cant ; " and all this, with not undue blunt- 
ness be it said, is unadulterated nonsense. The fact that it 
has been and will yet be a thousand times repeated, cannot 
make it anything else. In the first place, I very confidently 
submit, there is no more mental training in learning the Greek 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 1 9 

grammar by heart than in learning by heart any other equally 
difficult and, to a boy, unintelligible book. As a mere work 
of memorizing, Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason " would be at 
least as good. In the next place, unintelligent memorizing is 
at best a most questionable educational method. For one, I 
utterly disbelieve in it. It never did me anything but harm ; 
and learning by heart the Greek grammar did me harm, — a 
great deal of harm. While I was doing it, the observing and 
reflective powers lay dormant; indeed, they were systemati- 
cally suppressed. Their exercise was resented as a sort of im- 
pertinence. We boys stood up and repeated long rules, and 
yet longer lists of exceptions to them, and it was drilled into 
us that we were not there* to reason, but to rattle off something 
written on the blackboard of our minds. The faculties we had 
in common with the raven were thus cultivated at the expense 
of that apprehension and reason which, Shakespeare tells us, 
makes man like the angels and God. I infer this memqry- 
culture is yet in vogue; for only yesterday, as I sat at the 
Commencement table with one of the younger and more active 
of the professors of the college, he told me that he had no dif- 
ficulty with his students in making them commit to memory ; 
they were well trained in that. But when he called on them 
to observe and infer, then his troubles began. They had never 
been led in such a path. It was the old, old story, — a lamen- 
tation and an ancient tale of wrong. There are very few of us 
who were educated a generation ago who cannot now stand 
up and glibly recite long extracts from the Greek grammar ; 
sorry am I to say it, but these extracts are with most of us all 
we have left pertaining to that language. But, as not many of 
us followed the stage as a calling, this power of rapidly learn- 
ing a part has proved but of questionable value. It is true, the 
habit of correct verbal memorizing will probably enable its 
fortunate possessor to get off many an apt quotation at the 
dinner-table, and far.be it from me to detract from that much 
longed-for accomplishment; but, after all, the college professes 



20 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

to fit its students for life rather than for its dinner-tables, and 
in life a happy knack at quotations is in the long run an indiffer- 
ent substitute for the power of close observation, and correct 
inference from it. To be able to follow out a line of exact, 
sustained thought to a given result is invaluable. It is a weapon 
which all who would engage successfully in the struggle of 
modern life must sooner or later acquire ; and they are apt to 
succeed just in the degree they acquire it. In my youth we 
were supposed to acquire it through the blundering application 
of rules of grammar in a language we did not understand. The 
training which ought to have been obtained in physics and math- 
ematics was thus sought for long, and in vain, in Greek. That 
it was not found, is small cause for wonder now. And so, look- 
ing back from this standpoint of thirty years later, and thinking 
of the game which has now been lost or won, I silently listen 
to that talk about " the severe intellectual training," in which 
a parrot-like memorizing did its best to degrade boys to the 
level of learned dogs. 

Finally, I come to the great impalpable-essence-and-precious- 
residuum theory, — the theory that a knowledge of Greek 
grammar, and the having puzzled through the Anabasis and 
three books of the Iliad, infuses into the boy's nature the im- 
perceptible spirit of Greek literature, which will appear in the 
results of his subsequent .work, just as manure, spread upon a 
field, appears in the crop which that field bears. But to pro- 
duce results on a field, manure must be laboriously worked 
into its soil, and made a part of it ; and only when it is so 
worked in, and does become a part of it, will it produce its 
result. You cannot haul manure up and down and across a 
field, cutting the ground into deep ruts with the wheels of your 
cart, while the soil just gets a smell of what is in the cart, and 
then expect to get a crop. Yet even that is more than we did, 
and are doing, with Greek. We trundle a single wheelbarrow- 
load of Greek up and down and across the boy's mind; and 
then we clasp our hands, and cant about a subtile fineness and 



A COLLEGE FETICH. . 21 

impalpable but very precious residuum ! All we have in fact 
done is to teach the boy to mistake means for ends, and to 
make a system of superficiality. 

Nor in this matter am I speaking unadvisedly or thought- 
lessly. My own experience I have given. For want of a 
rational training in youth I cannot do my chosen work in life 
thoroughly. The necessary tools are not at my command ; it is 
'too late for me to acquire them, or to learn familiarly to han- 
dle them ; the mischief is done. I have also referred to my 
family experience. Just as the wrestler in the gymnasium, 
after describing how he had himself fared in the games, might, 
in support of his conclusions, refer to his father and grand- 
father, who, likewise trained in the gymnasium, had been noted 
athletes in their days, so I, coming here and speaking from 
practical experience, and practical experience alone, must cite 
that experience where I best can find it. I can find it best at 
home. So I appeal to a family experience which extends 
through nearly a century and a half. It is worth giving, and 
very much to the point. 

I do not think I exceed proper limits when I say that the 
family of which I am a member has, for more than a hundred 
years, held its own with the average of Harvard graduates. 
Indeed, those representing it through three consecutive gener- 
ations were rather looked upon as typical scholars in politics. 
They all studied Greek as a requirement to admission to col- 
lege. In their subsequent lives they were busy men. Without 
being purely literary men, they wrote a great deal ; indeed, 
the pen was rarely out of their hands. They all occupied high 
public position. They mixed much with the world. Now let 
us see what their actual experience in life was : how far did 
theif college requirements fit them for it? Did they fit them 
any better than they have fitted me? I begin with John 
Adams. 

John Adams graduated in the class of 1755, — a hundred 
and twenty-eight years ago. We have his own testimony on 



22 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

the practical value to him of his Greek learning, expressed in 
an unguarded moment, and in a rather comical way. I shall 
give it presently. Meanwhile, after graduation John Adams 
was a busy man as a school-teacher, a lawyer and a patriot, 
until at the age of forty-two he suddenly found himself on the 
Atlantic, accredited to France as the representative of the 
struggling American colonies. French was not a require- 
ment in the Harvard College of the last century, even to' 
the modest extent in which it is a requirement now. Greek 
was. But they did not talk Greek in the diplomatic circles 
of Europe then any more than they now talk it in the 
Harvard recitation-rooms ; and in advising John Adams of 
his appointment, James Lovell had expressed the hope that 
his correspondent would not allow his " partial defect in the 
language " to stand in the way of his acceptance. He did 
not; but at forty-two, with his country's destiny on his shoul- 
ders, John Adams stoutly took his grammar and phrase-book 
in hand, and set himself to master the rudiments of that living 
tongue which was the first and most necessary tool for use in 
the work before him. What he afterwards went through — 
the anxiety, the humiliation, the nervous wear and tear, the 
disadvantage under which he struggled and bore up — might 
best be appreciated by some one who had fought for his life 
with one arm disabled. I shall not attempt to describe it. 

But in the eighteenth century the ordinary educated man 
set a higher value on dead learning than even our college pro- 
fessors do now; and, in spite of his experience, no one thought 
more of it than did John Adams. So when in his closing years 
he founded an academy, he especially provided, bowing low 
before the fetich, that " a schoolmaster should be procured, 
learned in the Greek and Roman languages, and, if thought 
advisable, the Hebrew; not to make learned Hebricians, but 
to teach such young men as choose to learn it the Hebrew 
alphabet, the rudiments of the Hebrew grammar, and the use 
of the Hebrew grammar and lexicon, that in after life they 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 23 

may pursue the study to what extent they please." Instead of 
taking a step forward, the old man actually took one back- 
wards. And he went on to develop the following happy edu- 
cational theory, which if properly considered in the light of the 
systematic superficiality of thirty years ago, to which I have 
already alluded, shows how our methods had then deteriorated. 
What was taught was at least to be taught thoroughly; and, as 
I have confessed, I have forgotten the Greek letters. " I hope," 
he wrote, " the future masters will not think me too presump- 
tuous, if I advise them to begin their lessons in Greek and He- 
brew by compelling their pupils to write over and over again 
copies of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, in all their variety 
of characters, until they are perfect masters of those alphabets 
and characters. This will be as good an exercise in chirog- 
raphy as any they can use, and will stamp those alphabets and 
characters upon their tender minds and vigorous memories so 
deeply that the impression will never wear out, and will enable 
them at any period of their future lives to study those languages 
to any extent with great ease." • 

This was fetich-worship, pure and simple. It was written in 
the year 1822. But practice is sometimes better than theory, 
and so I turn back a little to see how John Adams's practice 
squared with his theory. In his own case, did the stamping 
of those Greek characters upon his tender mind and vigorous 
memory enable him at a later period " to study that language 
to any extent with great ease"? Let us see. On the 9th of 
July, 181 3, the hard political wrangles of their two lives being 
over, and in the midst of the second war with Great Britain, 
I find John Adams thus- writing to Thomas Jefferson, — and I 
must confess to very much preferring John Adams in his easy 
letter-writing undress, to John Adams on his dead-learning 
stilts ; he seems a wiser, a more genuine man. He is answer- 
ing a letter from Jefferson, who had in the shades of Monticello 
been reviving his Greek: — 

" Lord ! Lord ! what can I do with so much Greek ? When I was 



24 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

of your age, young man, that is, seven or eight years ago [he was then 
nearly seventy-nine, and his correspondent a little over seventy], I felt 
a kind of pang of affection for one of the flames of my youth, and again 
paid my addresses to Isocrates and Dionysius Halicarnassensis, etc., 
etc., etc. I collected all my lexicons and grammars, and sat down to 
Ilept o-vvBecrews ovojxaTwv. In this way I amused myself for some time, 
but I found that if I looked a word to-day, in less than a week I had 
to look it again. It was to little better purpose than writing letters on 
a pail of water." 

This certainly is not much like studying Greek " to any ex- 
tent with great ease." But I have not done with John Adams 
yet. A year and one week later I find him again writing to 
Jefferson. In the interval, Jefferson seems to have read Plato, 
sending at last to John Adams his final impressions of that 
philosopher. To this letter, on the 16th of July, 1814, his cor- 
respondent replies as follows : — 

" I am very glad you have seriously read Plato, and still more re- 
joiced to find that your reflections upon him so perfectly harmonize 
with mine. Some thirty years ago I took upon me the severe task of 
going through all his works. With the help of two Latin translations, 
and one English and one French translation, and comparing some of 
the most remarkable passages with the Greek, I labored through the 
tedious toil. My disappointment was very great, my astonishment was 
greater, and my disgust was shocking. Two things only did I learn 
from him. First, that Franklin's ideas of exempting husbandmen and 
mariners, etc., from the depredations of war were borrowed from him ; 
and, second, that sneezing is a cure for the hiccough. Accordingly, I 
have cured myself and all my friends of that provoking disorder, for 
thirty years, with a pinch of snuff." x 

As a sufficiently cross-examined witness on the subject of 
Greek literature, I think that John Adams may now quit the 
stand. 

More fortunate than his father, John Quincy Adams passed 
a large part of his youth in Europe. There, in the easy 

1 John Adams's Works, vol. x. pp. 49, 102. 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 2$ 

way a boy does, he picked up those living languages so in- 
estimably valuable to him in that diplomatic career which 
subsequently was no less useful to his country than it was hon- 
orable to himself. Presently he came home, and, acquiring 
his modicum of Greek, graduated at Harvard in the class of 
1788. Then followed his long public life, stretching through 
more than half a century. I would, for the sake of my argu- 
ment, give much could I correctly weigh what he owed during 
that public life to the living languages he had picked up in 
Europe, against what he owed to the requirements of Harvard 
College. Minister at. the Hague, at Berlin, and at St. Peters- 
burg, negotiator at Ghent, his knowledge of living tongues 
enabled him to initiate the diplomatic movement which re- 
stored peace to his country. At St. Petersburg he at least 
was not tongue-tied. Returning to America, for eight years 
He was the head of the State Department, and probably the 
single member of the Government who, without the assistance 
of an interpreter, could hold ready intercourse with the repre- 
sentatives of other lands. Meanwhile, so far as Greek was 
concerned, I know he never read it ; and I suspect that, labor- 
loving as he was, he never could read it. He could with the 
aid of a lexicon puzzle out a phrase when it came in his way, 
but from original sources he knew little or nothing of Greek 
literature. It would have been better for him if he had also 
dropped his Latin. I have already said that the, display of 
cheap learning made the American oration of fifty years ago a 
national humiliation ; it was bedizened with classic tinsel. In 
this respect John Ouincy Adams shared to the full in the 
affectation of his time. Ready, terse, quick at parry and 
thrust in his native tongue, speaking plainly and directly to 
the point, with all his resources at his immediate command, 
■ — I think I may say he never met his equal in debate. Yet 
when in lectures and formal orations he mounted the classic 
high-horse and modelled himself on Demosthenes and Cicero, 
he became a poor imitator. As an imitator he was as bad as 



26 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

Chatham. More could not be said.- That much he owed to 
Harvard College, and its little Latin and less Greek. 

But I must pass on to the third generation. Fortunate like 
his father, Charles Francis Adams spent some years of his 
boyhood in Europe, and in many countries of Europe ; so that 
at six years old he could talk, as a child talks, in no less than 
six different tongues. Greek was not among them. Return- 
ing to America he too fitted for Harvard, and in so doing made 
a bad exchange ; for he easily got rid forever of the German 
speech, and with much labor acquired in place thereof the 
regulation allowance of Greek. He was graduated in the class 
of 1-825. After graduation, having more leisure than his father 
or grandfather, — that is, not being compelled to devote him- 
self to an exacting profession, — he, as the phrase goes, "kept 
up his Greek." That is, he occupied himself daily, for an hour 
or so, with the Greek masterpieces, puzzling them laboriously 
out with the aid of grammar and lexicon. He never acquired 
any real familiarity with the tongue ; for I well remember that 
when my turn at the treadmill came, and he undertook to aid 
me at my lessons, we were very much in the case of a boy 
who was nearly blind, being led by a man who could only 
very indistinctly see. Still he for years " kept up his Greek," 
and was on the examining-committee of the College. And 
now, looking back, I realize at what a sad cost to himself he 
did this ; for in doing it he lost the step of his own time. Had 
he passed those same morning hours in keeping himself 
abreast with modern thought in those living tongues he had 
acquired in his infancy, and allowed his classics to rest undis- 
turbed on his library shelves, he would have been a wiser, a 
happier, and a far more useful man. But modern thought 
(apart from politics), modern science, modern romance and 
modern poetry soon ceased to have any charm for him. Nev- 
ertheless, he did not wholly lose the more useful lessons of his 
infancy. For years, as I have said, he officiated on the Greek 
examining-committee of the College ; but at last the time came 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 27 

when his country needed a representative on a board of inter- 
national arbitration. Then he laid his lexicon and grammar 
aside forever, and the almost forgotten French of his boyhood 
was worth more — a thousand-fold more — to him and his 
country than all the concentrated results of the wasted leisure 
hours of his maturer life. 

I come now to the fourth generation, cutting deep into the 
second century. My father had four sons. We were all 
brought up on strict traditional principles, the special family 
experience being carefully ignored. We went to the Latin 
schools, and there wasted the best hours of our youth over the 
Greek grammar, — hours during which we might have been 
talking French and German, — and presently we went to Har- 
vard. When we got there we dropped Greek, and with one 
voice we have all deplored the irreparable loss we sustained in 
being forced to devote to it that time and labor which, other- 
wise applied, would have produced results now invaluable. 
One brother, since a Professor at Harvard, whose work here 
-was not without results, wiser than the rest, went abroad after 
graduation, and devoted two years to there supplying, imper- 
fectly and with great labor, the more glaring deficiencies of 
his college training. Since then the post-graduate knowl- 
edge thus acquired has been to him an indispensable tool of 
his trade. Sharing in the modern contempt for a superficial 
learning, he has not wasted his time over dead languages 
which he could not hope thoroughly to master. Another of 
the four, now a Fellow of the University, has certainly made no 
effort to keep up his Greek. When,' however, his sons came 
forward, a fifth generation to fit for college, looking back over 
his own experience as he watched them at their studies, ,his 
eyes were opened. Then in language certainly not lacking in 
picturesque vigor, but rather profane than either classical or 
sacred, he expressed to me his mature judgment. While he 
looked with inexpressible self-contempt on that worthless 
smatter of the classics which gave him the title of an educated 



28 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

man, he declared that his inability to follow modern thought 
in other tongues, or to meet strangers on the neutral ground 
of speech, had been and was to him a source of life-long 
regret and the keenest mortification. In obedience to the 
stern behest of his Alma Mater he then proceeded to sacrifice 
his children to the fetich. 

My own experience I have partly given. It is unnecessary 
for me to repeat it. Speaking in all moderation, I will merely 
say that, so far as I am able to judge, the large amount of my 
youthful time devoted to the study of Greek, both in-my school 
and college life, was time as nearly as possible thrown away. 
I suppose I did get some discipline out of that boyish martyr- 
dom. I should have got some discipline out of an equal num- 
ber of hours spent on a treadmill. But the discipline I got 
for the mind out of the study of Greek, so far as it was carried 
and in the way in which it was pursued in my case, was very 
much such discipline as would be acquired on the treadmill 
for the body. I do not think it was any higher or any more 
intelligent. Yet I studied Greek with patient fidelity ; and 
there are not many modern graduates who can say, as I can, 
that they have, not without enjoyment, read the Iliad through 
in the original from its first line to its last. But I read it ex- 
actly as some German student, toiling at English, might read 
Shakespeare or Milton. As he slowly puzzled them out, an 
hundred lines in an hour, what insight would he get into the 
pathos, the music and the majesty of Lear or of the Paradise 
Lost? What insight did I get into Homer? And then they 
actually tell me to my face that unconsciously, through the 
medium of a grammar, a lexicon and Felton's Greek Reader, 
the subtile spirit of a dead literature was and is infused into a 
parcel of boys ! 

So much for what my Alma Mater gave me. In these days 
of repeating-rifles, she sent me and my classmates out into 
the strife equipped with shields and swords and javelins. We 
were to grapple with living questions through the medium of 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 29 

dead languages. It seems to me I have heard, somewhere else, 
of a child's cry for bread being answered with a stone. But on 
this point I do not like publicly to tell the whole of my own 
experience. It has been too bitter, too humiliating. Repre- 
senting American educated men in the world's industrial gath- 
erings, I have occupied a position of confessed inferiority. I 
have not been the equal of my peers. It was the world's 
Congress of to-day, and Latin and Greek were not current 
money there. 

• Such is a family and individual experience covering a cen- 
tury and a half. With that experience behind me,. I have sons 
of my own coming forward. I want them to go to college, — 
to Harvard College ; but I do not want them to go there by 
the path their fathers trod. It seems to me that four genera- 
tions ought to suffice. Neither is my case a single one. I am, 
on the contrary, one of a large class in the community, very 
many of whom are more imbued than I with the scientific and 
thorough spirit of the age. As respects our children, the 
problem before us is a simple one, and yet one very difficult 
of practical solution. We want no more classical veneer. 
Whether on furniture or in education, we do not admire 
veneer. Either impart to our children the dead languages 
thoroughly or the living languages thoroughly; or, better 
yet, let them take their choice of either. This is just what 
the colleges do not do. On the contrary, Harvard stands 
directly in the way of what a century-and-a-half 's experience 
tells me is all important. 

I have already referred to the way in which this comes about. 
It was Polonius, I think, who suggested to his agent that he 
should "by indirections find directions out; " and that is what 
Harvard does with our youth. Economically speaking, the 
bounty or premium put upon Greek is so heavy that ^ 
amounts to a prohibition of other things. To fit a boy for 
college is now no small task. The doing so is a specialty in 
itself; for the standard has been raised, and the list of require- 



30 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

ments increased. Candidates for admission to the Freshman 
Class must know a little of a good many things. To acquire 
this multifarious fractional knowledge takes a great deal of 
time. To impart it in just the proper quantities, and in such 
a way that it shall all be on hand and ready for exhibition on 
a given day, affords the teachers of the academies, as I am 
given to understand, all the occupation they crave. The re- 
quirements being thus manifold, it is a case of expressio zmius, 
exclusio alterius. Accordingly, one thing crowding another 
out, there does not exist, so far as I am able to learn, a single 
school in the country which will at the same time prepare my 
sons for college, and for what I, by long and hard experience, 
perfectly well know to. be the life actually before them. The 
simple fact is that the college faculty tell me that I do not 
know what a man really needs to enable him to do the edu- 
cated work of modern life well; and I, who for twenty years 
have been engaged in that work, can only reply that the mem- 
bers of the faculty are laboring under a serious misappre- 
hension as to what life is. It is a something made up, not 
of theories, but of facts, — and of confoundedly hard facts, at 
that. 

The situation has its comical side, and is readily suggestive 
of sarcasm. Unfortunately, it has its serious side also. It is 
not so very easy to elude the fetich. Of course, where means 
are ample it is possible to improvise an academy through 
private instruction. But the contact with his equals in the 
class and on the playground is the best education a boy ever 
gets, — better than a rudimentary knowledge of Greek, even. 
According to my observation, to surround children with tutors 
at home is simply to emasculate them. Then, again, they can 
be sent to Europe and to the schools there. But that way 
danger lies! For myself, whatever my children are not, I want 
them to be Americans. If they go to Europe, I must go with 
them ; but as the people of modern Europe do not speak 
Greek and Latin, in which learned tongues alone I am theoreti- 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 3 I 

cally at home, a sojourn of some years in a foreign academic 
town, though as a remedy it may be effective, yet at the time 
of life at which those of my generation have now unhappily 
arrived, it partakes also of the heroic. 

Such is the dilemma in which I find myself placed. Such is 
the common dilemma in which all those are placed who see 
and feel the world as I have seen and felt it. We are the 
modernists and a majority; but in the eyes of the classicists 
we are, I fear, a vulgar and contemptible majority. Yet I 
cannot believe that this singular condition of affairs will last a 
great while longer. The measure of reform seems very simple 
and wholly reasonable. The modernist does not ask to have 
German and French substituted for Greek and Latin as the 
basis of all college education. I know that he is usually rep- 
resented as seeking this change, and of course I shall be 
represented as seeking it. This, however, is merely one of 
those wilful misrepresentations to which the more disingenu- 
ous defenders of vested interests always have recourse. So 
far from demanding that Greek and Latin be driven out and 
French and German substituted for them, we do not even ask 
that the modern languages be put on an equal footing with 
the classic. Recognizing, as every intelligent modernist must, 
that the command of several languages, besides that which is 
native to him, is essential to a liberally educated man, — recog- 
nizing this fundamental fact, those who feel as I feel would by 
no means desire that students should be admitted to the college 
who could pass their examinations in German and French, 
instead of Greek and Latin. We are willing — at least I 
am willing — to concede a preference, and a great preference, 
to the dead over the living, to the classic over the modern. 
All I would ask, would be that the preference afforded to the 
one should no longer, as now, amount to the practical prohi- 
bition of the other. I should not even wish for instance, that, 
on the present basis of real familiarity, Greek should count 
against French and German combined as less than three counts 



32 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

against one. This, it seems to me, should afford a sufficient 
bounty on Greek. In other words, the modernist asks of the 
college to change its requirements for admission only in this 
wise : Let it say to the student who presents himself, " In 
what languages, besides Latin and English, — those are re- 
quired of all, — in what other languages — Hebrew, Greek, 
German, French, Spanish, or Italian — will you be examined? " 
If the student replies, " In Greek," so be it, — let him be ex- 
amined in that alone ; and if, as now, he can stumble through 
a few lines of Xenophon or Homer, and render some simple 
English sentences into questionable Greek, let that suffice. 
As respects languages, let him be pronounced fitted for a col- 
lege course. If, however, instead of offering himself in the 
classic, he offers himself in the modern tongues, then, though 
no mercy be shown him, let him at least no longer be turned 
contemptuously away from the college doors; but, instead 
of the poor, quarter-knowledge, ancient and modern, now 
required, let him be permitted to pass such an examination 
as will show that he has so mastered two languages besides his 
own that he can go forward in his studies, using them as 
working tools. Remember that, though we are modernists, we 
are yet your fellow-students ; and so we pray you to let us 
and our children sit at the common table of the Alma Mater, 
even though it be below the salt. 

That an elementary knowledge of one dead language should 
count as equal to a thorough familiarity with two living lan- 
guages ought, I submit, to be accepted as a sufficient educa- 
tional bounty on the former, and brand of inferiority on 
the latter. The classicist should in reason ask for no more. 
He should not insist that his is the only, as well as the royal, 
road to salvation. Meanwhile the modernist would be per- 
fectly satisfied with recognition on any terms. He most cer- 
tainly does not wish to see modern languages, or indeed 
any other subject, taught in preparatory schools as Greek 
was taught in them when we were there, or as it is taught 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 33 

in them now, — I mean as a mere college requirement. Be- 
lieving, as the scientific modernist does, that a little knowl- 
edge is a contemptible thing, he does not wish to see the 
old standard of examinations in the dead languages any 
longer applied to the living. On the contrary, we wish 
to see the standard raised ; and we know perfectly well 
that it can be raised. If a youth wants to enter college on 
the least possible basis of solid acquirement, by all means let 
Greek, as it is, be left open for him. If, however, he takes the 
modern languages, let him do so with the distinct understand- 
ing that he must master those languages. After he enters the 
examination-room no word should be uttered except in the 
language in which he is there to be examined. 

Consider now, for a moment, what would be the effect on the 
educational machinery of the country of this change in the col- 
lege requirements. The modern, scientific, thorough spirit 
would at once assert itself. Up to this time it has, by that 
tradition and authority which are so powerful in things educa- 
tional, been held in subjection. Remove the absolute protec- 
tion which hitherto has been and now is accorded to Greek, 
and many a parent would at once look about for a modern, as 
opposed to a classical, academy. To meet the college require- 
ments, that academy would have to be one in which no English 
word would be spoken in the higher recitation-rooms. Every 
school exercise would be conducted by American masters pro- 
ficient in the foreign tongues. The scholars would have to 
learn languages by hearing them and talking them. The nat- 
ural law of supply and demand would then assert itself. The 
demand is now a purely artificial one, but the supply of Greek 
and Latin, such as it is, comes in response to it. Once let a 
thorough knowledge of German and French and Spanish be as 
good tender at the college-door as a fractional knowledge of 
either of the first two of those languages and of Greek now 
is, and the academies would supply that thorough knowledge 
also. If the present academies did not supply it, other and 
better academies would. 



34 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

But I have heard it argued that in order to attain the ends I 
have in view no such radical change as that involved in drop- 
ping Greek from the list of college requirements is at all neces- 
sary. The experience of Montaigne is cited, told in Montaigne's 
charming language. It is then asserted that the compulsory 
study of Greek has not been discontinued in foreign colleges ; 
and yet, as we all know, the students of those colleges have an 
ever increasing mastery of the living tongues. I do not propose 
to enter into this branch of the discussion. I do not profess 
to be informed as to what the universities of other lands have 
done. As I have repeatedly said, I have nothing of value to 
contribute to this debate except • practical, individual experi- 
ence. So in answer to the objections I have just stated, I 
hold it sufficient for my purpose to reply that we have to deal 
with America, and not with Germany or France or Great 
Britain. The educational and social conditions are not the 
same here as in those countries. Our home-life is different, 
our schools are different ; wealth is otherwise distributed ; 
the machinery for special instruction which is found there 
cannot be found here. However it may be in England or 
in Prussia, however it may hereafter be in this country, our 
children cannot now acquire foreign languages, living or dead, 
in the easy, natural way, — -in the way in which Montaigne, 
acquired them. The appliances do not exist. 'Consequently 
there is not room in one and the same preparatory school 
for both the modernist and the classicist. Under existing 
conditions the process of acquiring the languages is too slow 
and laborious ; the one crowds out the other. In the univer- 
sity it is not so. The two could from the beginning there move 
side by side ; under the elective system they do so already, 
during the last three years of the course. I would put no 
obstacle in the way of the scholar whose tastes turn to classic 
studies. On the contrary, I would afford him every assistance, 
and no longer clog and encumber his progress by tying him to 
a whole class-room of others whose tastes run in opposite 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 35 

directions, or in no direction at all. Indeed, it is curious to 
think how much the standard of classic requirements might be 
raised, were not the better scholars weighted down by the pres- 
ence of the worse. But while welcoming the classicist, why 
not also welcome the modernist? Why longer say, "By 
this one avenue only shall the college be approached " ? Why 
this narrow, this intolerant spirit? After all, the university is a 
part of the machinery of the world in which we live ; and, as I 
have already more than once intimated, the college student 
does not get very far into that world, after leaving these classic 
shades, before he is made to realize that it is a world of facts, 
and very hard facts. As one of those facts, I would like to 
suggest that there are but two, or at most three, languages 
spoken on these continents in which ours i-s the "dominant 
race. There is a saying that a living dog is better than a dead 
lion ; and the Spanish tongue is what the Greek is not, — a 
very considerable American fact. 

Here I might stop ; and here, perhaps, I ought to stop. I 
am, however, unwilling to do so without a closing word on one 
other topic. For the sake of my argument, and to avoid mak- 
ing a false issue, I have in everything I have said, as between 
the classic and modern languages, fully yielded the preference 
to the former. I have treated a mastery of the living tongues 
simply as an indispensable tool of trade, or medium of speech 
and thought. It was a thing which the scholar, the professional 
man and the scientist of to-day must have, or be unequal to 
his work. I have made no reference to the accumulated lit- 
erary wealth of the modern tongues, much less compared their 
masterpieces with those of Greece or Rome. Yet I would not 
have it supposed that in taking this view of the matter I 
express my full belief. On the contrary, I most shrewdly 
suspect that there is in what are called the educated classes, 
both in this country and in Europe, a very considerable 
amount of affectation and credulity in regard to the Greek and 



36 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

Latin masterpieces. That is jealously prized as part of the 
body of the classics, which if published to-day, in German or 
French or English, would not excite a passing notice. There 
are immortal poets, whose immortality, my mature judgment 
tells me, is wholly due to the fact that they lived two thousand 
years ago. Even a dead language cannot veil extreme ten- 
uity of thought and fancy ; and, as we have seen, John Adams 
and Thomas Jefferson were in their day at a loss to account 
for the reputation even of Plato. 

In any event, this thing I hold to be indisputable : of those 
who study the classic languages, not one in a hundred ever 
acquires that familiarity with them which enables him to judge 
whether a given literary composition is a masterpiece or not. 
Take your own case and your own language for instance. For 
myself, I can freely say that it has required thirty years of in- 
cessant and intelligent practice, with eye and ear and tongue 
and pen, to give me that ready mastery of the English language 
which enables me thoroughly to appreciate the more subtile 
beauties of the English literature. I fancy that it is in our 
native tongue alone, or in some tongue in which we have 
acquired as perfect a facility as we have in our native tongue, 
that we ever detect those finer shades of meaning, that hap- 
pier choice of words, that more delicate flavor of style, 
which alone reveal the master. Many men here, for in- 
stance, who cannot speak French or German fluently, can read 
French and German authors more readily than any living man 
can read Greek, or than any, outside of a few college profes- 
sors, can read Latin ; yet they cannot see in the French or 
German masterpieces what those can see there who are to the 
language born. The familiarity, therefore, with the classic 
tongues which would enable a man to appreciate the classic 
literatures in any real sense of the term is a thing which can- 
not be generally imparted. Even if the beauties which are 
claimed to be there are there, they must perforce remain 
concealed from all, save a very few, outside of the class of 
professional scholars. 



A COLLEGE FETICH. 37 

But are those transcendent beauties really there? I greatly 
doubt. I shall never be able to judge for myself, for a mere 
lexicon-and-grammar acquaintance with a language I hold to 
be no acquaintance at all. But we can judge a little of what 
we do not know by what we do know, and I find it harder and 
harder to believe that in practical richness the Greek literature 
equals the German, or the Latin the French. Leaving practi- 
cal richness aside, are there in the classic masterpieces any bits 
of literary workmanship which take precedence of what may 
be picked out of Shakspeare and Milton and Bunyan and 
Clarendon and Addison and Swift and Goldsmith and Gray 
and Burke and Gibbon and Shelley and Burns and Macaulay 
and Carlyle and Hawthorne and Thackeray and Tennyson? 
If there are any such transcendent bits, I can only say that 
our finest scholars have failed most lamentably in their at- 
tempts at rendering them into English. 

For myself, I cannot but think that the species of sanctity 
which has now, ever since the* revival of learning, hedged the 
classics, is destined soon to disappear. Yet it is still strong; 
indeed, it is about the only patent of nobility which has sur- 
vived the levelling tendencies of the age. A man who at 
some period of his life has studied Latin and Greek is an 
educated man; he who has "not done so is only a self-taught 
man. Not to have studied Latin, irrespective of any present 
ability to read it, is accounted a thing to be ashamed of; to 
be unable to speak French is merely an inconvenience. I 
submit that it is high time this superstition should come to an 
end. I do not profess to speak with authority, but I have cer- 
tainly mixed somewhat with the world, its labors and its litera- 
tures, in several countries, through a third of a century ; and I 
am free to say, that, whether viewed as a thing of use, as an 
accomplishment, as a source of pleasure, or as a mental train- 
ing, I would rather myself be familiar with the German tongue 
and its literature than be equally familiar with the Greek. I 
would unhesitatingly make the same choice for my child. What 



38 A COLLEGE FETICH. 

I have said of German as compared with Greek, I will also say 
of French as compared with Latin. On this last point I have 
no question. Authority and superstition apart, I am indeed 
unable. to see how an intelligent man, having any considerable 
acquaintance with the two literatures, can, as respects either 
richness or beauty, compare the Latin with the French ; while 
as a worldly accomplishment, were it not for fetich -worship, in 
these days of universal travel the man would be properly 
regarded as out of his mind who preferred to be able to read 
the odes of Horace, rather than to feel at home in the accepted 
neutral language of all refined society. This view of the case 

is not yet taken by the colleges. 

i 

"The slaves of custom and established mode, 
With pack-horse constancy we keep the road, 
Crooked or straight, through quags or thorny dells, * 

True to the jingling of our leader's bells." 

And yet I am practical and of this world enough to believe, 
that in a utilitarian and scientific age the living will not for- 
ever be sacrificed to the dead. The worship even of the classi- 
cal fetich draweth to a close ; and I shall hold that I was not 
myself sacrificed wholly in vain, if what I have said here may 
contribute to so shaping the policy of Harvard that it will not 
much longer use its prodigious "influence towards indirectly 
closing for its students, as it closed for me, the avenues to 
modern life and the fountains of living thought. 



APPENDIX. 



In preparing, now six months since, the foregoing Address, 
I carefully took the ground that I could speak upon the sub- 
ject which I undertook to discuss, only from individual expe- 
rience. I further expressed the opinion, that not one man 
in ten thousand could now contribute to the discussion of 
that subject anything in the way of more profound views or 
deeper insight. The numerous contributions to newspapers 
and magazines which have been called forth by my Address 
seem to justify this opinion. So far as they have given indi- 
vidual experience, on the one side or the other, they have 
been of value ; but in them I have seen nothing in *the way 
of insight or profundity of view which has seemed to me 
new, or of particular interest. The one man in ten thousand 
has not yet spoken ; or, if he has spoken, his voice has not 
reached me. Meanwhile, I have several times seen it asserted 
that.rrfy evidence was of small value, and, indeed, hardly en- 
titled to any consideration at all, inasmuch as I confessed that 
of Greek literature I had no knowledge worthy of the name, — 
merely, in fact, that of nine graduates in ten. The methods 
of studying the language, it has also been said, have since my 
school-days been so improved upon that my experience has 
no bearing on present conditions. And it has further been 
more than intimated that the Harvard of 1856 was excep- 
tional, and that those taught in other and perhaps more 
favored colleges would hardly coincide in any of the opinions 



40 APPENDIX. 

I expressed. I have, therefore, looked with much interest 
upon other accounts of individual post-graduate experience 
with Greek which have from time to time been elicited. One 
of these has seemed to me so very much to the point, and so 
directly in the line of what I have said, that I cannot forbear 
reproducing it in full, as cumulative evidence, now that I have 
occasion to bring out a new edition of my Address. 

At a meeting of the Yale Alumni held at Springfield, Mass., 
on the 15th of October last, Mr. George S. Merriam is re- 
ported as having made the following speech. To it, in con- 
nection with my own Address, I would ask particular attention, 
as, if my utterances were those of one who had only studied 
Greek at Harvard in 1853, his are those of one who, between 
i860 and 1868, has both studied and taught Greek at Yale. 

" An assembly such as the present, in discussing a theme like this, 
may well take the character less of a debating club than of an expe- 
rience meeting. I give my own experience in the matter of Greek, 
as being in no important respect exceptional, but, as I suppose, fairly 
typical. During the three or four years of study preparatory to Yale 
College, and the first two years and a half in college, I was obliged to 
spend one third of my time in the study of Greek ; the other two 
thirds were chiefly employed in Latin and mathematics. I thus had 
to bestow on Greek fully one third of my working hours for six years. 
Two solid years, in other words, were given to that language, — spread 
out over the golden period for study, between the ages of fourteen and 
twenty. I may say that I made a fair use of my opportunities, for I 
ranked in Greek in the first half-dozen of my class. Two years after 
graduation I was appointed to a tutorship, and for a year and a half 
taught Demosthenes to the sophomores. 

" Now, what working knowledge of Greek did I acquire through all 
this process ? There was never a time when I could read an average 
half-page of prose Greek without the use of a lexicon. There was never 
a time when I could read so simple an author as Xenophon except 
slowly and toilfully. For any purpose of familiar use, of unforced lit- 
erary enjoyment, Plato and Thucydides, Homer even, and far more the 
great tragic poets, are and always have been sealed books to me. I 



APPENDIX. 41 

can read and enjoy Plato — in Jowett's translation. I can read a little 
of the Greek Testament — especially when I have the English text on 
the opposite page. How many of you, I wonder, who listen to me, — 
of you who all gave in effect two of the best years of your youth to the 
study of Greek, — have to-day, or have ever had, the ability to read the 
easiest Greek author at sight? 

" For my owli part, I do not for an instant consider the time I spent 
on Greek as wasted. I am sure I owe much to its training in close 
application, in mental exactitude, in nicety of thought and expression. 
Something I owe to even that remote contact I enjoyed with the fresh- 
ness of Homer, the grandeur of yEschylus, the inspiration of Plato. I 
acknowledge an especial debt to the instructor who taught me to appre- 
ciate the consummate blending of passion and art in the orations of 
Demosthenes. Not lightly would I forego all that I gained from these 
sources. But I have to ask : Was all this worth the cost ? And the cost 
is measured by the studies which were necessarily excluded by the pre- 
dominance of the classics. Under our collegiate system, as it existed 
and still exists, the centre, nucleus, and main body of pre-collegiate and 
collegiate, study is Latin, Greek, and mathematics. Of these things I 
got some smattering ; but of the history of my own country my Alma 
Mater neither taught me nor caused me to be taught any appreciable 
knowledge. My years at Yale fell just at the time when American his- 
tory was in the tremendous climax of the civil war ; but when I was 
graduated, in 1864, I believe I could have passed a better examination 
in the history of Athens or of Rome than of my own nation. I am 
confident I could have given a better account of the Persian and Pelo- 
ponnesian wars than of our own war of the Revolution. ' I could have 
told vastly more of the six legendary kings of Rome than of the first 
six governors of Plymouth or of Massachusetts Bay. I knew some- 
thing about the constitution of ancient Athens, but I could not have 
explained the opposing theories of Jefferson and Hamilton, or defined 
the Wilmot Proviso. From college, again, I carried away some slight 
rudimentary knowledge of French, — by no means enough to read a 
French newspaper or to converse. Of German or of any other modern 
language I had no knowledge whatever. 

" I do not propose, gentlemen, to inflict upon you a catalogue of 
the things I do not know, and never did know, — nor even of my 



42 APPENDIX. 

deficiencies in what should be the common property of all educated 
men ; nor do I propose to hold Alma Mater responsible for all my own 
derelictions. But I must specify one more omission. Up to the day 
when I took my diploma, there had been, I may say, nothing in my 
education that required me to use my eyes or any of my senses or per- 
ceptions, for any purpose save to read the printed page. I had been 
taught no knowledge, and no means of acquiring knowledge, except 
from books. Of knowledge at first hand — of observation, through 
the senses, of the myriad activities and beauties which make up this 
divine world — I had learned absolutely nothing. When in the junior 
year we came, at last, to make some acquaintance with Nature's work- 
ings, we were totally unversed in the use of our faculties except through 
books ; so we were introduced to Nature herself through books alone, — 
that is, at second hand. We were taught a little chemistry, but in such 
fashion that we never handled a chemical substance, or saw one save at 
a distance in the recitation-room. We were taught a little geology, but 
with no more personal acquaintance with the rocks than could be gath- 
ered from one or two afternoon strolls with an instructor. We studied 
astronomy for two terms without once being called on to look at 
the stars. Of the growth of the grass-blade and the tree, of the pro- 
cesses and laws of our own bodies, not a jot or a tittle was given in 
the preparatory or the collegiate course. Worse than all these specific 
defects, the whole habit of personal observation of the phenomena and 
processes of the material world — that material world through whose 
forms the spiritual world discloses itself to man — was left out of our 
education entirely. That omission for myself I unspeakably lament. 
History and literature I can to some extent pick up as I go along. I 
can hobble on my way, though unequipped with German or French. 
But I never shall get that intelligent, sympathetic, working knowledge 
of my physical environment for which the aptitude and instinct might 
have been easily gained when I was fourteen or sixteen, when I was 
buried in Greek paradigms, stumbling through fiovXevoi and the uses of 
the subjunctive. And as I walk among the wonders of Nature, moved 
by their beauty, but ignorant of their interior processes, — ignorant of 
how the leaf germinates and ripens and falls, vaguely guessing at the 
story of the immemorial past written in this river valley and its moun- 
tain portals, — in my mingled wonder and ignorance I am like a child 



APPENDIX. 43 

untaught to read wandering through a library : he admires the pictures, 
but the text is meaningless to him. For in my youth I was given indeed 
some of the keys to the riches of literature, but of things I never learned 
the alphabet. I acquired no use of my perceptions save with my eyes to 
read the written page, and with my ears to hear my instructor's voice. 

" For my own part, even though I could read Greek like my mother- 
tongue, I should not consider it a due compensation for these omis- 
sions. And to-day I see the boys of the coming generation going 
through the same process. It is Latin, Greek, mathematics, — mathe- 
matics, Latin, Greek. No time for history ; small time for French and 
German; no knowledge given, no aptitude trained, save through the 
medium ot the printed page. Must it be so forever? May we not say 
at least thus much : If mental discipline requires that the boy or girl 
study mathematics for five or six years, be it so ! If discipline and 
knowledge of the foundations of English require six or seven years of 
Latin, be it so ! — but at least let the line of obligatory study of the dead 
languages be drawn at Latin. In the name of the shortness of life, in 
the name of the vital, throbbing interests of our own generation, in the 
name of the obligation upon the educated man to ' serve the present 
age,' let the two solid years of youth now devoted to Greek be spent 
on something more closely related to living, human concerns ! " 

Meanwhile, the argument from individual experience has 
been met in a way which commands, and should command, 
the most respectful consideration. Other experience — alleged 
to be wider, more weighty, and more fully considered than 
mine — has been adduced on the opposite side of the ques- 
tion. The classicists, without any comment upon it or argu- 
ment of their own, have translated and published Dr. Hofmann's 
Inaugural Address upon his assuming the rectorship of the 
University of Berlin, in October, 1880. To the translation of 
this Address have been appended the two opinions of the 
Philosophical Faculty of the Royal Frederick William Univer- 
sity, on the admission to the University of graduates from the 
Prussian Realschulen. These opinions were given in 1869 and 
1880. In both the admission to the University of scholars 



44 APPENDIX. 

without classical training was objected to strongly and with 
one voice; and in the report of 1880 the opposition is based 
on the practical experience of ten years. 

It would be useless to deny that, in any intelligent discus- 
sion, evidence such as this is entitled to great weight. By 
the advocates of an exclusively classic education it has been 
received as a final settlement of the whole debate. Nothing 
further ought to be asked for. The desired experiment, it has 
been claimed, " fortunately for us," has already been tried in 
Germany; and it has there been found that, even for the 
mathematical and physical sciences, " a regular classical 
course, including Greek, furnishes a . better preparation than 
is attained by the non-classical, but most skilfully devised and 
ably conducted curriculum of the Realschulen." The argu- 
ment is closed. 

It must be admitted that, if the argument is not closed, the 
weight of evidence from observation and experience is for the 
time being in favor of the classical course. The advocates of 
change are bound to show some good reason why the evidence 
now adduced should not be given all the weight which is its 
apparent due. Had the burden of refuting it devolved upon 
me, I must at once admit that I should not have proved equal 
to the occasion. To carry on the discussion called for perfect 
familiarity with a leading modern language. That familiarity 
was indeed a necessary tool for doing the work in hand. For 
reasons which I need not repeat, the tool in question is not 
ready to my hand. I am a college graduate and a so-called 
educated man ; but, owing to the system of my Alma Mater, I 
can hold no personal intercourse with the educated men of 
other lands. In this respect, it is admitted, my case is not 
exceptional. Our principal seats of learning, it has been ap- 
parent in the course of this discussion, pride themselves, rather 
than otherwise, on a contemptuous disregard of living lan- 
guages as compared with the dead. 



APPENDIX. 45 

Most fortunately others, wiser than I or better advised in 
early life, found themselves fully equipped for the work to 
which I was unequal. As the result of personal inquiry on 
the spot, they were able to take up the reports of the German 
authorities, and show why they neither did nor should con- 
clude the debate which it had been my fortune to open in its 
present form in America. Meanwhile, in submitting the fol- 
lowing, as it seems to me, very conclusive paper by Professor 
James, of the University of Pennsylvania, which I find in the 
Popiilar Science Monthly of January, 1884, one reflection natu- 
rally suggests itself. The debate was begun in English. The 
advocates of an exclusively classic course find their strongest 
argument in documents which they translate from the German; 
and I find myself at once excluded from the discussion on the 
very grounds upon which I based my whole arraignment of 
our university training. I am at least able, therefore, to ad- 
duce one more apt illustration in support of my thesis of June 
last. 

" The discussion as to the relative merits of the classics and other 
subjects, as constituents of a liberal course of study, has always been 
marked by a great deference to authority. The assertions of eminent 
men, as to the advantage or disadvantage to them of the classical 
course which they pursued while young, always play a prominent 
part. The testimony of eminent educators, as to their observation of 
the effect that a study of the classics seemed to have on the minds 
and hearts of their pupils, is quoted and requoted. The tradition and 
usages of hundreds of years are strongly appealed to in order to show 
the superiority of the one system over the other. 

" The present discussion in our American press has been no excep- 
tion to the rule. But, in addition to the regular authorities which are 
quoted on all occasions, a new witness has been appealed to in this 
controversy, whose testimony on the question is regarded by many as 
decisive and final. This is the experience of the Germans, embodied in 
what is known as the ' Berlin Report.' It seems to be supposed that this 
thorough-going people have entered into the subject experimentally 



4.6 APPENDIX. 

and on an extensive scale, with a view of settling it effectually. They 
have made, it is asserted, a fair trial of these two systems of education ; 
and, having weighed both in the balance, they have found the modern 
system wanting to such a degree that they have concluded to discard it 
forever. There seems to be wide-spread misconception about this Ger- 
man experiment ; and the conclusions drawn from it are so unwarrant- 
able that a review of the main features of the case may be useful in 
correcting erroneous impressions. 

"As is well known, there are two classes of schools in Germany 
which prepare boys for the university, — the Gymnasien (gymnasia) 
and the Realschide7i (real schools). The former are the classical 
schools, whose curriculum consists in the main of Latin, Greek, and 
mathematics, and graduation from which confers the right to enter 
any department of the university. The real schools are institutions 
whose course of study embraces less Latin than the former, and no 
Greek, the place of the latter being represented partly by more of 
the modern languages and partly by natural science. The gymnasia 
are old schools, being the legitimate successors of the schools which 
dated from the revival of letters. The real schools are products of 
the modern spirit ; and, although dating from about 1 740, they did not 
acquire a. recognized standing until late in this century. The earliest 
of these schools were the answer to the demand for ' practical ' educa- 
tion in the narrowest sense of that term. It was not until 1859 that 
the Government of Prussia fully recognized them. In that year the 
schools passing under that name were classified, according to length 
of course, into first, second, and third class. The course of the first 
class was made of the same length as that of the gymnasium, — that of 
the other classes was shorter. From that year the friends of the real 
schools demanded that graduates of schools of the first class should be 
admitted to the universities. Their claims excited at first only a smile 
of derision ; but so vigorously did they push matters that the Govern- 
ment, in 1869,' was persuaded to take the first move in the case by ask- 
ing the faculties of the various Prussian universities for their opinions on 
the subject. This called out a series of reports which were very strong 
against admission. It is curious that in this series of reports language 
was used from which we might infer that the universities had already 
tried the experiment ; as when it is asserted in one report that the 



APPENDIX. 47 

gymnasium students soon overtake real-school students even in natural 
science, — that at a time when real-school graduates were not admitted 
to the universities. The Government decided, however, to admit the 
real-school students to certain branches, which it did by the order of 
Dec. 7, 1870. 

"Until 18 71, then, the graduates of real schools were not admitted 
to any department of the universities in Prussia as candidates for a 
degree. In that year they were allowed to matriculate in the univer- 
sity for the study of modern languages, mathematics, and natural 
science. After an experience of about eight years, on the 18th of 
December, 1879, Professor Droysen, of the University of Berlin, moved 
that the faculty of that institution request the Government to recon- 
sider its policy in regard to the admission of real-school students to the 
philosophical faculty. After some discussion, Professor Hiibner, the 
dean of the faculty, was requested to ask the various professors for 
statements of their experience with the two classes of students. These 
statements were laid before the faculty ; and the most important, being 
incorporated in the form of a report, were sent, in March, 1880, to the 
Government, with the petition that the latter would reconsider the 
whole matter, — the real object of the report being to move the Gov- 
ernment to rescind the order of Dec. 7, 1870. These were not the first 
statements on the question ; for the Minister of Public Instruction had 
already, a short time before, made inquiries of many leading professors 
in the various universities as to their experience in the matter since 
187 1. The most of them held views similar to those of the Berlin 
professors. The set of statements, with the petition above referred 
to, constitutes the ' Berlin Report,' and, on account of its formal 
and authoritative ■ character, has excited world-wide attention and 
discussion. 

" These reports are now quoted by many as a final settlement of the 
much-disputed question between the ' classicists ' and the ' modernists,' 
and by many more as expressing the judgment of educated Germany, at 
least, on the subject. Thus, President Porter, in his article in the Prince- 
ton Review for September last, says : ' The question of the superiority of 
a classical to a modern training has of late been subjected to a practi- 
cal trial on an extensive scale, by a comparison of the results of the 
gymnasial curriculum and that of the Fealschule, as a preparation for a 



48 APPENDIX. 

university course and indirectly for civil administration. In most of 
the German States — in Prussia pre-eminently — an attendance upon 
the university course, with a certificate of fidelity and a succession of 
•satisfactory examinations, had been the essential prerequisites to many 
of the most desirable official positions in civil life. To admission to all 
the privileges of the university, an attendance upon the gymnasium 
with the classical curriculum was an essential prerequisite, carrying with 
it the consequence that to all the higher posts of civil life a course of 
classical study, including Greek and Latin, had till recently been a con- 
ditio sine qua non. The Realschulen, which gave a shorter and a more 
scientific and popular course, in which Greek was not included, and 
the Latin was scanty, furnish an example of a modernist education. It 
was very natural that this condition of things should be felt to be in- 
equitable by the teachers and pupils of these schools, and that an ear- 
nest movement should be made to set it aside. In several of the States 
it was successful. In Prussia, against strong conviction to the contrary, 
it was allowed for a term of years by way of experiment, that the " mod- 
ernists " (the Abiturienten der Realschuleii) should enter the university 
and enjoy all its privileges. When this term had expired, elaborate re- 
ports were called for from the leading instructors in all the universities, 
of their judgment as to the proved capacity and success of the students 
who had attended upon their classes, from each of the two preparatory 
institutions with their separate curricula. With but few exceptions the 
reports were decidedly in favor of the classical curriculum as giving a 
better training even to the students of the mathematical and physical 
sciences.' 

" We wish to call attention here to the fact that President Porter's 
first sentence, though evidently without any intention on his part, is 
misleading. He says that ' the question of the superiority of a classical 
to a modern training has of late been subjected to a practical trial.' 
Not at all ; but simply the question of the relative superiority of the 
graduates of the German gymnasia and real schools, as they exist to-day 
in Germany, as indeed President Porter himself states in the next to 
the last sentence quoted above. This last is a very different question, 
indeed, from the former. The one is, so to speak, concrete ; the other, 
abstract. The professors were not asked for their opinions as to 
whether a classical is better than a modern training ; but is the gymna- 



APPENDIX. 49 

siast, as you know him from the existing schools, better fitted for your 
work than the real scholar who during the last eight years has attended 
the university? 

" If it should appear upon examination that the curricula of the real 
schools are not what is demanded by the most thoughtful ' modernists,' 
that the teachers are not, as a class, equal to those in the gymnasia, 
that the pupils are, as a whole, inferior in natural ability, that the real 
schools are not fostered by the Government to the same extent as the 
classical schools, it will be evident to every one that the significance 
of the Berlin Report for the real question at issue — namely, classics at 
their best versus modern subjects at their best, on an equal footing in 
every respect — becomes very slight. 

" As appears from what we have said above, President Porter is mis- 
taken when he says that the graduates of the real schools were admitted 
to all the privileges of the university. They were only admitted to cer- 
tain branches in one faculty, namely, the philosophical faculty. They 
were not, however, admitted for a definite number of years, as President 
Porter states, but for an indefinite period. The ministerial regulation 
admitting them says nothing whatever of any number of years for which 
it is valid. It holds good until supplanted by one prohibiting the ad- 
mission of real-school students ; and there is no sign that such a regula- 
tion will ever be made. 

"To begin with, then, all this quoting of the Berlin and similar 
reports in favor of retaining Greek as a required study in our liberal 
curricula is aside from the point, since that report was made on a very 
different subject. The attempt to apply conclusions on concrete ques- 
tions in one country to concrete questions in another is at all tinies a 
misleading and often a dangerous ptocedure. 

" Now as to the report itself, it may fairly be objected by the real- 
school men that the real schools have not had a fair trial, that the period 
of probation has been so brief that any report made now, whether 
favorable or unfavorable, must be regarded as premature and at best 
merely provisional. The real schools of the first class are not yet 
twenty-five years old. The regulation admitting their graduates to 
partial university privileges bears date, as said above, of Dec. 7, 1870. 
In less than ten years they were expected to win a place by the side of 
their rivals, which even their bitter opponents (for the professors who 

4 



50 APPENDIX. 

made the reports were all graduates of the gymnasia) should acknowl- 
edge to be an equal one ; and if they should not succeed in doing this, 
they were to be condemned as unable to fit boys properly for the uni- 
versity. Further, they were expected to do this with almost no aid 
from the Government, while their rivals were largely supported by con- 
tributions from the State. How just this complaint is, may be seen 
from the reports of Government aid accorded in Prussia to these two 
classes of schools. In the year 1869 the Government contributed 
714,148 thalers out of a total expenditure of 2,851,253 thalers for 
gymnasia; and in 1874, 1,319,990 thalers out of a total of 4,385,940 
thalers for the same purpose. In the former year the real schools of the 
first class cost 666,368 thalers, of which the Government contributed 
15,558 thalers. In the latter year the respective sums stood 1,251,921 
and 97,421 thalers. It thus appears that the Government paid in 1869 
nearly forty-six times as much toward supporting gymnasia as it did 
toward supporting real schools, and in 1874 over thirteen times as much. 
In 1869 it paid over twenty-five per cent of the total expense of all 
gymnasia, and less than three per cent of that of the real schools ; in 
1874 the respective rates stood over thirty per cent and less than eight 
per cent. It will thus be seen that the Government has proceeded on 
the plan of allowing the real schools to pay their own way. The wonder 
is, that they have such good results to show for their work under such 
circumstances. It should be also considered in this connection that 
the proper equipment of a real school, with first-class apparatus, etc., 
costs much more than that of a gymnasium. Another fact should be 
borne in mind, that, owing to this lack of support, the number of such 
schools is much smaller than that of the gymnasia, and they have con- 
sequently not had so extensive a* field to draw from as the latter. 
Another important point must be mentioned in this connection. Up to 
1871 the graduates of the real school passed immediately into active 
life, instead of attending a higher institution of learning. The matter 
and methods of the school had, therefore, exclusive reference to that 
fact, and under the new system they must have time to . modify and 
adapt themselves to the altered circumstances. Any practical teacher 
will appreciate the importance of this consideration. These are some 
of the objections which the defenders of the real schools have to urge 
against any unfavorable report made at this stage of the work. Against 



APPENDIX. 5 I 

this particular series of reports, made in the manner in which they were, 
they have still more serious objections, which we shall notice later. 

" Turning aside now to another phase of the subject, let us see 
whether any influences have been at work which tend to give the gym- 
nasia a better class of material to work with. If the boys who enter 
the gymnasia are decidedly superior in ability to those entering the 
real schools, we shall have a partial explanation of the better results 
achieved" by the former. 

" The first point to be mentioned in this connection is that the tra- 
ditions of Germany are classical. For decades and decades nearly 
every prominent man in law, medicine, theology, teaching, and (so far 
as nobility has not been accepted as a substitute for education) in the 
civil and military service of the country, has enjoyed the benefits of a 
classical education, if for no other reasons, simply because he was obliged 
to ' enjoy ' them as a condition of entering these careers. We all 
know how easily we associate two things which we always see together, 
in the relation of cause and effect. And so this eminence and culture 
which, owing largely to the artificial pressure we have mentioned, have 
for years and years in Germany been found in connection with a more 
or less complete knowledge of Latin and Greek, have come to be 
associated with the latter as effect from a cause. The sign has come 
to be largely accepted in place of the thing signified. It cannot have 
escaped the observation of any reflective person who has ever lived in 
Germany, that there is a very wide social chasm in that country be- 
tween the so-called liberally educated {die Studirteri) and those who 
have not pursued such courses. There is, so to speak, an educational 
hierarchy, and the only path to it lies, through the gymnasium. As in 
all hierarchies, so in this, there is an immense amount of Pharisaism, 
a touch-me-not and a come-not-near- with-unholy- hands kind of spirit 
which looks down on everything not of its type as something infinitely 
lower. The Studirter looks down, not only on the merchant or the 
artisan, but also upon the Volksschirilehrer (common-school teacher) 
with a calm sense of superiority and a provoking self-conceit, — no 
matter how successful the career of the latter may have been. A 
small professor in a small university, of small ability and still less suc- 
cess, commiserates the most successful common-school teacher because 
he has not studied Latin and Greek ; and we must add that the latter 



52 APPENDIX. 

envies the former, taking the sign (Latin and Greek) for the thing sig- 
nified (culture). No Studirter thinks of seriously discussing any ques- 
tion with a Non-studirter, but disposes of all difficult objections by the 
crushing answer that his opponent is an ungebildeter Mensch. 

" The artisan or merchant sees that no amount of culture derived 
from the study of modern subjects, or in the pursuit of his calling, or 
from the vigorous contact with active life, can secure for him a social 
recognition or equality with the Gelehrter ; the common-school teacher 
sees that no career of public service in his sphere, however useful or 
successful, can secure entrance for him into that charmed circle of the 
Gelehrtenthum, and silently resolves that his boy must have a different 
chance from that which he has had. Of the force which, this tra- 
ditional influence exerts no one can form an adequate idea who has not 
had the opportunity of associating intimately with the various classes 
of the people ; for, although a similar spirit may be met in America, 
it is of such small influence as hardly to be discernible. 

" A classical education has, then, come to be the proper thing in 
Germany for every aspiring man. It is a stamp of gentility, an ab- 
solute essential to high social position and influence. Every' parent 
desires to give it to his boy, if for no other reason, simply on account 
of this different social position which it confers upon him. To give 
him this education, he must send him to the gymnasium. 

" But there is another and still more powerful influence at work to 
secure the attendance at the classical schools. We have already cor- 
rected President Porter's statement that the graduates of the real 
schools are admitted to all the privileges of the university. They are 
not allowed to enter the law, medical, or theological faculties, and their 
privileges in the philosophical faculty are practically limited to the study 
of natural science, mathematics, and modern languages. That is to 
say, if a father wishes to keep open to his son, when he becomes twenty 
years of age, the choice of the .learned professions, and the possibility 
of obtaining any of the higher positions of the civil service, he must 
put him through the gymnasium in the first place. 

" Of course, under such circumstances, all professional men desire 
their boys to follow one of the learned professions, and send them con- 
sequently to a gymnasium. During an extensive tour in Germany last 
summer, the writer had the opportunity of meeting a large number 



APPENDIX. 53 

of university and other professional men. In answer to the question 
which was quite regularly asked, ' What school do your boys attend ? ' 
they replied, almost without exception : ' The gymnasium, of course ; 
we send them to the real school only when they are too stupid or too 
lazy to keep up in the gymnasium.' Thus the educated and intelligent 
classes send their boys, who, to some extent at least, have inherited 
their intelligence and ability, to the gymnasium. Those members of 
the mercantile or artisan class who have bright boys from whom they 
hope much, strain every nerve to support them at the school which 
forms the sole avenue to all Government honors and social position. 

"Do we not find here the explanation we are seeking? Is not this 
the secret why the boys who graduate from the gymnasium are as 
a class superior to those who finish a real-school course ? They are 
the brighter boys of the community ; they are, as a rule, of educated 
blood, from homes where education and refinement prevail, and life 
within which is of itself an education, where they find wise and dis- 
criminating assistance in their studies, a,nd encouragement and incite- 
ment to effort. 

" But the case is not by any means fully stated. The gymnasium 
not only gets better material to work upon than its rival, but it has 
also a superior corps of teachers. The writer was told by a gentleman 
who was a graduate of a real school, and who had been a teacher 
in one for some time, but had afterward made up the Greek and 
Latin of a gymnasium course in order to qualify himself for teaching 
in a gymnasium, that no teacher of ability and enterprise would re- 
main in a real school any longer than he was obliged to remain there. 
' There is no career in that line of work,' said he, ' and only block- 
heads and lazy hides \Dummkopfe and Faulpelze) stay in it,' Of 
course, that was a great exaggeration ; and yet it contained an element 
of truth, namely, that a process of selection is going on between these 
two schools, not only in regard to pupils, but also in regard to teachers, 
and the gymnasium has its pick of both. 

" The reason is not far to seek. It is to be found in the higher 
social position which tradition assigns to the office of gymnasial teacher, 
and the better career which the Government opens to it. How idle, in 
the face of all these facts, is the assertion that the Berlin Report has 
settled the question between the real school and the gymnasium, or 



54 APPENDIX. 

that it is of paramount significance in the deeper question of classical 
against modern training ! 

" To get a fair idea of the significance of this report, let one imagine 
the state of things which would exist in this country if the law of the 
land had for generations permitted no one to practise law or medicine, 
or enter the ministry or tfie civil service, or become a teacher in our 
higher schools and colleges, who had not first completed the classical 
course in an average college, and then attended a professional school for 
three years. Suppose that, after such a law had been enforced for a 
century, a proposition were made to allow such scientific schools as 
could spring up under those circumstances to present their students for 
certain subordinate places in the' civil service and in the academic 
career. Can there be any doubt that the adherents of the classical 
culture would point with pride to the fact that every eminent professional 
man for several generations had been the graduate of a classical school, 
and would make that a reason, as they do now in Germany, for refusing 
to admit any man with a different education to the practice of those 
professions? Would they not dwell on the great danger to the na- 
tional civilization which would arise from the fact that an element of 
discord would be introduced into the culture of the people by educating 
the young along two widely different lines ? * Would not our professors 
complain, as does one in Berlin, that they could not make so many 
references to Greece and Rome in their lectures, since some of their 
hearers would not understand them ? 

" Let us suppose, further, that the above proposition should be ac- 
cepted, and that after eight years a committee of the opponents of the 
measure should be called upon to express their opinions as to the re- 
sults qf the experiment. Could their report be considered as settling 
anything between the two opposing parties, — the defenders and oppo- 
nents of classical culture? Could the statement of these witnesses, 
that the students who, under such conditions, came from the scientific 

* This argument plays a large part in the German defence of a single school 
and a single course in preparation for all higher professions. "Our education," 
says one, " is homogeneous. Let the real school carry its point, and a hopeless 
and fatal element of antagonism will be introduced into our national life, and our 
higher scholarship, that fairest flower of our civilization, will perish from the 
earth ! " 



APPENDIX. 



55 



schools were not fully equal to those coming from the classical schools, 
be regarded as forever disposing of the claims of modern culture? 
The answer to this question can hardly be doubtful. And yet those 
who quote the Berlin Report, as settling this much-vexed question, must 
maintain that such a report as the imaginary one above described would 
be satisfactory and conclusive. 

" We have thus far proceeded upon the assumption that the Berlin 
and similar reports were prepared by unprejudiced men, after a careful 
and detailed examination of the records made by the graduates of 
these two schools, and uninfluenced by extraneous considerations. We 
are compelled to believe, however, after a somewhat detailed investi- 
gation, that no one of these assumptions is true. 

" The men who were asked for their opinions on this subject were 
almost, if not absolutely, without exception graduates of the gym- 
nasia. That lay, of course, in the nature of the case. Real-school 
graduates could not enter the universities until the spring of 1871. 
Allowing four years for the average length of time spent in the uni- 
versities, the first real-school men were graduated in 1875, and in 1879 
the first of these reports was prepared. As the candidates for admis- 
sion to the university faculty must study one year more before enter- 
ing the lowest grade of academic positions, and as promotions are very 
slow in Prussia, it would be a very rare thing for a graduate of 1875 to 
have reached a professorial chair by 1879. Those who made these re- 
ports were therefore men from rival schools, men imbued with prejudice 
in favor of the preparatory curriculum which they themselves had com- 
pleted, men entirely under the sway of the traditional feeling in regard 
to the classics, and, of course, inclined to look with disfavor upon real- 
school men as representing a movement which questions the worth of 
classical culture. It is a well-known fact that there is usually a strong 
tendency for a man to attribute his general success in life to the par- 
ticular things which he did, or left undone, and that it is an easy thing to 
regard an incidental as an essential. The worthy German professors 
are no exception to the rule. Many of them were so strongly con- 
vinced of the superiority of classical to modern training that they went 
out of their way to declare that a study of Latin and Greek is ab- 
solutely essential to high excellence in any department of intellectual 
effort ! 



56 • APPENDIX. 

" All these reports, both those of 1869 and those of later years, so far 
as they were made by the faculties, were as a rule draughted by volun- 
teers in the faculty ; and some rabidly classical man generally offered to 
do the work. When his report was laid before the faculty, many voted 
for it, or refrained from voting against it, for the simple reason that they 
did not have time to offer such modifications as they would like to have 
seen made in the language or matter of the report. Thus, the writer 
was told by one professor in a university which sent in a very strong 
report in favor of the gymnasiasts as against the real-school graduates : 
' Professor So-and-so ' (mentioning his name, — one well known in Ger- 
many) ' drew up our report. He is perfectly crazy on the subject ; but 
there was no one else to do it, and after he submitted it we did not 
want to do such an ungracious thing as reject a service which nobody 
else would undertake. I voted for his report, though I should have 
been glad to have a much more moderate and judicial report than the 
one we sent in.' It thus appears that these reports were prepared by 
men who were not only graduates of the gymnasium, but who were 
also, in some cases at least, regarded by their own friends as extremists. 
x\dd to this the fact that there were no representatives of the real 
schools in the reporting board who might have called attention to exag- 
gerations or misstatements, whether intentional or unintentional, and it is 
pretty clear that these reports cannot be called judicial, either in their 
form or spirit, but partake largely of the character of advocates' pleas. 

" It would be fair to suppose, however, that these men would at least 
examine the facts in the case as to how these real-school graduates 
turned out in after life, before making a report on their comparative 
ability. But even this supposition turns out to be an unfounded one. 
As is well known, there is no general system of recitation and record- 
keeping in German universities, such as we have in our American col- 
leges. The professor has, therefore, as a rule, no means of judging of 
a student's attainments. There are no examinations except the final 
one for a doctor's degree. The only institution bearing a resemblance 
to our recitation is the Seminar, a voluntary organization which many 
students never enter, and which varies greatly in character, according 
to the temperament of the professor in charge or to the subject-matter 
discussed. Being at times a society for the training of the members in 
the power of independent investigation and research, it becomes often 



APPENDIX. 57 

a mere ' quiz,' or indeed but little, more than a two hours' lecture on 
the part of the leader. With the exception of those students who enter 
the Seminar, the professor has no means of judging of the ability or 
training of the university students. The only test, therefore, is the rec- 
ord of such students in the final university examinations for a degree, 
which comparatively few students ever attempt ; their record in the 
State examinations, which nearly all try ; and the^final and decisive test 
of practical life and its demands. 

" Now, it is a pretty plain fact that the professors who made these re- 
ports did not take the trouble to investigate the results of these various 
tests, since it was reserved for a director of a real school to collect the 
first reliable and comprehensive statistics on the subject, and that after 
these reports were prepared. The data were furnished by the reports of 
the universities as to the number of degrees granted to real-school gradu- 
ates, by the reports of Government examiners as to the standing attained 
in the public examinations of such students, and, finally, by the reports 
from the present positions and sphere of labor of all real-school grad- 
uates who had taken degrees from the universities, or who had passed 
into the ranks of teachers without trying the university examination. 
We have not room to introduce the statistics here. Suffice it to say 
that they make a very good showing for real school graduates. The 
point that interests us most in this immediate connection is, that these 
facts were not ascertained or considered by the university professors who 
reported on this subject. 

"The same gentleman who collected these statistics tells a well- 
authenticated story of Professor Hanstein, of the University of Bonn, 
which very well illustrates the fairness, deliberation, and investigation 
which preceded and accompanied these reports. Upon receiving the 
notice asking for his written opinion, he remarked to his assistant : 
' So we have to commit ourselves in writing again, do we ? Of course, 
the gymnasia students are superior.' ' But, Herr Professor,' objected 
his assistant, ' Mr. X , who recently took his degree in natural sci- 
ence, passed summa cum faude, and he is a real-school graduate.' ' Yes ; 

well, he 's an exception.' ' And Herr Dr. , the Privatdocent here in 

Bonn, is also from a real school.' i He 's an exception, too,' answered 
Hanstein. ' And a few weeks ago,' continued his assistant, ' one of our 
real-school students passed his teacher's examination in chemistry and 



58 APPENDIX. 

natural history No. i.' ' Exceptions, — all exceptions ! ' replied the pro- 
fessor. ' Yes, but, Herr Professor, there are only seven or eight of us 
real-school men altogether here in Bonn.' 'We? Are you a real-school 
graduate?' 'Yes, sir.' ' Well, you are the biggest exception of all.' 
And, with that, he turned and left the room. The story, which is 
vouched for, needs no comment. 

" There is still another point to be considered. The practical object 
of these reports, as some professors conceived it, was to ascertain 
whether the faculties were in favor of excluding real-school students 
from the universities ; and indeed the language of the request justi- 
fied that view. Some voted for the reports, therefore, because they 
thought that the attendance at the universities is too large, and that 
the exclusion of real-school graduates offers a convenient means of 
getting rid of the surplus students. The writer visited twelve out of 
the twenty-one German universities, during the last semester, in order 
to ascertain what is doing in the various departments in which he 
takes special interest. Everywhere the question was asked of uni- 
versity professors, ' Do you think that too many are studying at the 
universities ? ' Almost uniformly the answer was returned, ' There is 
no doubt about it.' A few figures will make clear how rapidly of late 
years the number of students has increased. During the five years 
ending 1861, for every 100,000 inhabitants in Germany there were, on 
an average, thirty-two students in the universities. During the year 
1881-82 there were fifty-one students for the same number of inhabi- 
tants. Of these in the former period eight were enrolled in the philo- 
sophical faculty (the only faculty to which real-school students are 
admitted) ; in the latter period, 20.7. That is, in a little more thai* 
twenty years the number of students in the philosophical faculty per 
100,000 inhabitants has more than doubled. The average for the five 
years ending 1881 was eighteen, and the proportion is still increasing. 
This enormous increase in the number of students excites the gravest 
apprehension, and is characterized by thinking men as a sad state of 
affairs. 

" It may seem somewhat ludicrous to us to hear of an over-production 
of educated men. A German professor gave the key to the riddle, in a 
remark to the writer, that Germany is fostering the growth of an intel- 
lectual proletary, — that is, a class of professionally educated men for 



APPENDIX. 59 

whom there is no room in the professions, ana who are too proud to go 
into business of any sort. This state of affairs cannot be fully appre- 
ciated without going further into detail than the limits of this article 
allow. Suffice it to say that the German universities are essentially pro- 
fessional schools. A man who enters such an institution intends to be 
a lawyer, a physician, a minister, teacher, professor, or member of the 
civil service of the country, and he receives there his professional train- 
ing. It is easy to see that there can be an over-production in each and 
all of these fields. In this country such a state of things is easily 
remedied. If a man finds he has no chance to succeed as a lawyer, a 
year or two will turn him out a physician. If he fails in that, he can try 
theology, or he may go into business of some sort, or anybody can go 
into politics. In Germany the case is widely different. The Govern- 
ment demands such a long preliminary training and such intense and 
laborious effort in preparation, that, by the time a man finds there is no 
place for him in the profession he has chosen, his elasticity has gone, 
and there is no desire or ability to try anything else. To take up an- 
other profession he has become too old ; and to go into mercantile or 
industrial life he is forbidden by his ideas of social position and scholarly 
dignity. To such a man two courses are open, — to drag out a bare ex- 
istence, with many wants which his education has developed, but which 
he has no means of gratifying, or — to commit suicide. Many take the 
latter alternative ; and the enormous increase in suicides during the last 
few years is one of the saddest and most striking phenomena of German 
society, high and low. 

" That there is an over-production in the professional fields nearly 
all German thinkers agree. How can it be helped? The Government 
has lately called the attention of parents and teachers to the fact that 
the higher administrative positions in the civil service are all provided 
for, and that all vacancies for years to come can be filled from the 
present candidates. The opponents of the real schools now come for- 
ward and say : ' We can help the matter very easily. Shut out real- 
school graduates from the philosophical faculty, and there will be room 
enough for the surplus students of law and medicine to find careers.' 
Some professors voted for exclusion because they thought that the 
shutting out of real-school students would meet this rapidly growing 
evil of over-production in professional spheres. 



60 APPENDIX. 

"We think enough has been advanced to prove, i. That the Berlin 
Report has little bearing on the question we are discussing in this coun- 
try as to the respective merits of classical and modern training, for the 
simple fact that it was on an altogether different point ; 2. That as to 
the particular subject in regard to which it was prepared, it can lay no 
claim to be considered final, because it was made prematurely, at a time 
when the institution judged could, by the very nature of the case, have 
had no fair trial, and because it was made by prejudiced parties without 
sufficient investigation, and influenced by considerations which should 
have had nothing to do with the decision. 

" As a matter of fact, the opinion seems to be quite general in Ger- 
many that the real schools are bound to go forward to new struggles 
and to new conquests. They have lost none of the ground which they 
have ever won ; they are gaining new ground every day. It is a mere 
question of time when the medical schools will be opened to them, and 
some even dare hope that the law schools must yield also. They may 
suffer temporary reverses, but they are sure to win in the long run. One 
significant fact may be noted, which is beginning to tell in their favor. 
The men in Germany who have made the deepest and longest studies 
in the science of education are assuming a more favorable attitude 
toward the real schools. 

" The writer recently visited Professor Masius, who holds a chair of 
Pedagogics in the University of Leipsic. He was for years the director 
of a gymnasium, then of a real school of the first rank, and then- for 
years a member of the Ministry for Public Instruction in Saxony. On 
being asked what his position on the question of real school versus the 
gymnasium is, he replied : ' If you mean to ask me whether the real- 
school graduates I get in my work are the equals of the gymnasium grad- 
uates, I should say, no ! If you mean whether our real schools, as they 
are, afford as good a liberal training as the gymnasia, I should say, no ! 
If you mean whether a real school, as fully equipped in regard to 
teachers and apparatus as an ordinary gymnasium, and with a simpli- 
fied course of study, could give a liberal training equal to that afforded 
by the gymnasium, I should reply, I do not know, as the experiment 
has never been tried ; but I am inclined to think it could.' 

"The most advanced thinkers on pedagogics are coming to agree 
that the subject taught has much less to do with its value as a dis- 



APPENDIX. 6 1 

ciplinary and liberalizing study than the method of teaching it. Arith- 
metic may be so taught as to afford a much better training in language 
than half of our Latin and Greek teaching affords. There is a cer- 
tain convertibility in the possible subjects in a curriculum with regard 
to liberalizing effects which is often lost sight of, but which our best 
thinkers on the science of education are more and more inclined to 
emphasize. 

" It has been already remarked that it is a dangerous procedure to 
apply concrete conclusions in one country to concrete conditions in 
another. The quoting of German authority in favor of a gymnasium 
course in order to bolster up the classical course of an average Ameri- 
can college is a good instance in point. The German gymnasium gives 
nine hours a week for five years, and eight hours a week for four years 
more, to the study of Latin, — that is, seventy-seven hours a week for one 
year. It devotes to Greek seven hours a week for four years, and six 
hours a week for two years more, — that is, forty hours a. week for one 
year, or to both languages the equivalent of one hundred and seventeen 
hours a week for one year. It will be stating it beyond the truth to put the 
time devoted to Latin in our average American college up to the close 
of the sophomore year at five hours a week for six years, that is, thirty 
hours a week for one year, and to the Greek at five hours a week for 
five years, that is, twenty-five hours a week for one year, or to both 
together the equivalent of fifty-five hours a week for one year. The 
German gymnasium thus gives more than twice as many hours to Latin 
and Greek as the average American college course. Now, the leading 
German authorities who favor a gymnasium course have repeatedly 
opposed lessening the amount of time devoted to these two subjects, 
and have expressed their opinion to the effect that any considerable re- 
duction in the number of hours would be equivalent to depriving the 
course of all its value ; that is, so far from approving our classical curricu- 
lum, they unite in asserting that it is worth nothing whatever ! 

"A part of President Porter's argument in the article already referred 
to proceeds on the assumption that the average college boy acquires 
enough Latin and Greek to be able to read it easily. Whatever may 
have been true in President Porter's college days, the fact must appear 
evident to any one who has ever visited the sophomore classes in Greek 
in our American colleges, that the average boy does not acquire ability 



62 APPENDIX. 

to translate even such an easy author as Xenophon or Homer without 
difficulty. — not even in Yale College ; and the boy who takes up a 
Greek author and reads him for the pleasure that he derives from the 
thought is an avis rara indeed. It is the writer's opinion, based upon 
considerable investigation and comparison of notes with Greek teachers, 
both in America and Germany, that it is impossible for the average boy 
who spends the average amount of time on his Greek up to the close of 
his sophomore year to acquire the power of reading it easily. It is 
a universally admitted fact in Germany that the gymnasiast, who spends 
so much more time and labor than the American college boy, never 
acquires this power ; and it is as true of the former as it is of the latter 
that the last day of* his school-life is the last day of his Greek reading, 
with the exception of those following a profession which calls for a 
knowledge of the Greek, such as the philologists, philosophers, and 
clergymen. 

" One other point is worthy of notice. President Porter attempts 
to show that the main reason for unsatisfactory results in Greek study 
is the bad teaching of Greek which prevailed long ago, and which he 
hints has almost disappeared. That the teaching of Greek is now 
superior to what it was a generation ago we are very ready to believe, 
but it can hardly be said that there is any greater agreement among 
teachers as to the proper object of Greek study and the advantages 
to be derived from it. A visit to several of our leading colleges last 
winter, and conversation with the professors and instructors in Greek, 
revealed to the writer the very greatest differences of opinion, not only 
among the various colleges, but even among the representatives of that 
study within the same college. It is evident that the teachers who 
believe that the most important object to be attained is the ability to 
read Greek at sight, and to understand it without having to translate 
it, will pursue a very different method from those who see in the " in- 
cidental training " in grammar, logic, philology, etc., the chief benefit 
from Greek study. And yet the writer recently found these two 
opposite views held by two men in the same department of one of our 
leading colleges, the one of whom had one division of the sophomore 
class and the other the second division. It is hardly necessary to say 
that, however much the second may have benefited his class, the first 
did not get his division to read Greek at sight. 



APPENDIX. 63 

" The writer does not wish to be misunderstood. He is making no 
attack on the study of Greek. He remembers well the keen pleasure 
and, as he thinks, profit with which he pursued the study of Greek 
under an exceptionally able series of teachers, and his viris illustris- 
simis sununas gratias agit, semperque habebit. But he realizes well 
the great importance of these educational questions, and that many of 
them can never be settled except by actual experiment. It is of the 
highest importance that all things should be fairly tried, and that 
held fast which is good. It is demanded in the interests of society 
that modern education have a fair chance by the side of classical edu- 
cation. That chance it has, as yet, nowhere had. Our colleges, so 
far as they have admitted scientific students, have allowed them to 
come in with a very inferior preparation. The French and German, 
and for that matter the English too, in most of our colleges, are mere 
child's play, where they are not broad and ridiculous farces, the butt 
of students and professors alike. Let some of our colleges inaugurate 
the reform : lay out a ' modern ' course for admission and for college 
on the same general principle as the classical course, — few subjects, 
but long-continued and detailed study in each of them, — and insist on 
as thorough and vigorous work as they do in their Latin and Greek, 
and then, after a Fair trial, compare results. The friends of ' modern ' 
education are willing to abide by the outcome. In the mean time 
it will be wise for the classicists to avoid quoting reports that have 
nothing to do with the question, and appealing to authority which, 
upon investigation, turns out to be squarely on the other side of the 
point in dispute." 

But in the discussion which has been so actively going on 
since June last, the German authority is not the only authority 
which has been appealed to with deference. The assertions 
of eminent Englishmen as to the advantage or disadvantage to 
them of the classical course which they pursued while young, 
have been made to play a prominent part. Yet the same 
discussion which is now going on in Cambridge, America, is 
now also going on in Cambridge, England ; and it only remains 
to show that the weight of authority there is not all on one 



64 APPENDIX. 

side. This was very clearly proven by Professor E. L. Youmans 
in the pages of the Popular Science Monthly for November and 
December last. 

"The question, then, is : To what extent is Mr. Adams's view sub- 
stantiated by the testimony of others, and of those who must be regarded 
as the highest authorities? Let us rule out the enemies of the classics 
— those ignorant of them or prejudiced against them — and appeal to 
men whose sympathies and predilections are on the other side, but who 
have had large opportunities of observing the results of classical study, — 
eminent educators, college presidents, experienced teachers, and profes- 
sors of Latin and Greek, and those who have systematically and under 
responsibility inquired into the general working of this kind of education. 

" It may be said that the American standard of classical attainment is 
low, and that we must go where the system has been more faithfully 
tried, for the highest evidence of its advantages. Very well ; and it 
happens that this evidence is abundant. Classical studies have been 
tested upon the most extensive scale, and under all the most favorable 
conditions. For hundreds of years they have been the staple elements 
of English culture. The English universities and the great public 
schools of England form a consolidated system devoted for centuries 
almost exclusively to classical teaching. The system has had the au- 
thority of tradition, it has been backed by abounding wealth, it has had 
the patronage of Church and State, and has been cherished by insti- 
tutions of every grade, which have been independent of all disturbance 
from the caprice of public opinion. If 'the perfection of the Greek 
language,' as President Porter assumes, fits it as 'an instrument for the 
perpetual training of the mind of the later generations,' then the cir- 
cumstances of English education have been most favorable for proving 
it. But what is the result? A thousand authorities may be summed 
up in the following sentence of a letter from Professor Blackie, of Edin- 
burgh, to the late Dr. Hodgson. He says : ' I entirely agree with you 
that the present system of classical education, as a general method of 
training English gentlemen, is a superstition, a blunder, and a failure.' 
The evidence is overwhelming that the great mass of students, in the 
best English institutions, so far from gaining access- to the sphere of 



APPENDIX. 65 

classical thought, do not even get a decent knowledge of the bare forms 
of the dead languages themselves. To such an extent had classical 
study become itself an utter failure, and to such an extent did it stand 
in the way of all other studies, that it came to be widely denounced as 
a scandal to the nation, and the Government was called upon to inter- 
fere and put an end to it. They are very cautious in England about 
meddling with old and venerated things by the intervention of law, but 
they have a salutary habit of inquiring into them with great thorough- 
ness upon suitable occasions. Parliamentary commissions were there- 
fore appointed to investigate the condition of education, both in the 
universities and in the great public schools which prepare young men 
for the universities. The reports that resulted were monuments alike of 
searching inquiry and the total failure of the cherished classical educa- 
tion. The London Times thus summed up the report of the com- 
missioners upon the teaching of the public schools : ' In one word, we 
may say that they find it to be a failure, — a failure, even if tested by 
those better specimens, not exceeding one third of the whole, who go 
up to the universities. Though a very large number of these have 
literally nothing to show for the results of their school-hours, from 
childhood to manhood, but a knowledge of Latin and Greek, with a 
little English and arithmetic, we have here the strongest testimony that 
their knowledge of the former is most inaccurate, and their knowledge 
of the latter contemptible.' 

"And now let us observe how this thorough-going system is charac- 
terized by one who has had the best possible opportunities for observing 
and knowing its results. In a lecture delivered before the Royal In- 
stitution of Great Britain, by the Rev. F. W. Farrar, a distinguished 
author and philologist, and who was one of the masters of Harrow 
School, and for thirteen years a classical teacher, we have the following 
estimate of the present value of the system. Canon Farrar says : ' I 
must, then, avow my own deliberate opinion, arrived at in the teeth of 
the strongest possible bias and prejudice in the opposite direction, — 
arrived at with the fullest possible knowledge of every single argument 
which may be urged on the other side, — I must avow my distinct con- 
viction that our present system of exclusively classical education, as a 
whole, and carried out as we do carry it out, is a deplorable failure. I 
say it, knowing that the words are strong words, but not without having 

5 



66 APPENDIX. 

considered them well; and I say it because that system has been 
" weighed in the balance and found wanting." It is no epigram, but a 
simple fact, to say that classical education neglects all the powers of 
some minds, and some of the powers of all minds. In the case of the 
few it has a value which, being partial, is unsatisfactory ; in the case of 
the vast multitude it ends in utter and irremediable waste.' 

" In speaking of the defects in teaching the dead languages, Presi- 
dent Porter refers to the superiority in some points of English over 
American methods. He says : ' The culture and elevation which might 
come, were the power of rapid and facile reading cultivated, and the use 
of it, or the expression of thought and feeling appreciated, fail in great 
measure to be attained. These mistakes and failures are probably more 
conspicuous in the American colleges than in those of England or Ger- 
many, for the reason that in England composition in prose and verse 
compels to a certain mastery of the vocabulary, and a sense of the use 
of words which mere grammatical analysis can never impart.' 

" Certainly, if anywhere, we should expect to find in these critical 
constructive exercises in ' composition in prose and verse,' which Presi- 
dent Porter recognizes as a special excellence of the English teaching, 
the most successful exemplification of the benefits of classical culture. 
But Canon Farrar refers to this very practice in the following scathing 
terms as the worst failure of the system : ' To myself, trained in the 
system for years, and training others in it for years, — being one of 
those who succeeded in it, if that amount of progress which has been 
thought worthy of high classical honors in two universities may be called 
success, — influenced, therefore, by every conceivable prejudice of au- 
thority, experience, and personal vanity in its favor, I can only give my 
emphatic conclusion that every year the practice of it appears to me in- . 
creasingly deplorable, and the theory of it every year increasingly absurd.' 

"After giving some examples, this disgusted but unusually candid clas- 
sical teacher thus proceeds : 'This is the sort of " kelp and brick dust ". 
used to polish the cogs of their mental machinery ! And when, for a 
good decade of human life, and those its most invaluable years, a boy has 
stumbled on this dreadful mill-round, without progressing a single step, 
and is plucked at his matriculation for Latin prose, we flatter ourselves, 
forsooth, that we have been giving him the best means for learning Latin 
quotations, for improving taste (or what passes for such), for acquiring 



APPENDIX. 67 

the niceties of Greek and Latin scholarship ! We resent the nickname 
of the " Chinese of Europe," yet our education offers the closest possi- 
ble analogue to that which reigns in the Celestial Empire, and for cen- 
turies we have continued, and are continuing, a system to which (so far 
as I know) no other civilized nation attaches any importance, yet which 
leaves us to borrow our scholarship second-hand from them ; which is 
now necessary for the very highest classical honors at the University of 
Cambridge alone ; in which only one has a partial glimmering of success, 
for hundreds and hundreds who inevitably fail ; and in which the few 
exceptional successes are so flagrantly useless that they can only be re- 
garded at the best as a somewhat trivial and fantastic accomplishment, — 
an accomplishment so singularly barren of all results that it has scarcely 
produced a dozen original poems on which the world sets the most 
trifling value. While we waste years in thus perniciously fostering idle 
verbal imitations, and in neglecting the rich fruit of ancient learning for 
its bitter, useless, and unwholesome husk, — while we thus dwarf many 
a vigorous intellect, and disgust many a manly mind, — while a great 
university, neglecting in large measure the literature and the philosophy 
of two leading nations, contents itself with being, in the words of one of 
its greatest sons, "a bestower of rewards for school-boy merit," — while 
thousands of despairing boys thus waste their precious hours in " con- 
tracting their own views and deadening their own sensibilities " by a 
failure in the acquisition of the useless, — while we apply this inconceiv- 
ably irrational process to Greek and Latin, and to no other language 
ever yet taught under the sun, — while we thus accumulate instruction 
without education, and feel no shame or compunction if at the end of 
many years we thrust our youth, in all their unwarned ignorance, through 
the open gate of life, — while, I say, such a system as this continues and 
flourishes, which most practical men have long scorned with an im- 
measurable contempt, do not let us consider that we have advanced a 
single step in reforming education, to reform which, in the words of Leib- 
nitz, is to reform society and to reform mankind.' 

" We last month cited conclusive testimony that, as a matter of fact, 
classical studies are a general and notorious failure ; we now propose 
to look a little into the causes of that failure. The partisans of the 
system have a ready reason for so much of it as they have not the 



68 APPENDIX. 

assurance to deny. They admit that the dead languages may partially 
fail because they are poorly taught. 

" It is significant that this complaint of bad classical teaching has 
been made for hundreds of years. The indictments of the system on 
this score by eminent men would fill a big book. But why, then, have 
not the sorely needed reforms been carried out? The subject is surely 
important enough, and has been prominent enough to enforce attention 
to it. It has occupied the scholarly talent of generations ; yet, where 
the system has been tried longest, the best minds have still cried out 
against the unbroken experience of failure, notwithstanding all attempts 
to reform the bad practices. Two hundred years ago, the mode of 
studying the dead languages was sharply condemned by John Milton, 
who thus wrote : ' We do amiss to spend seven or eight years in scrap- 
ing together so much miserable Greek and Latin as might be learned 
otherwise easily and delightfully in one year.' Miltoir^believed in 
reform, and had the most sanguine hope from a better system, which 
would do more even for dunces than the prevailing method could do 
for brighter minds ; and he gives to his expectation the following quaint 
and vigorous expression : ' I doubt not that ye shall have more ado to 
drive our dullest and laziest youth, our stocks and stubs, from the in- 
finite desire of such a happy nurture, than we have now to hale and 
drag our hopefullest and choicest wits to that asinine feast of sow- 
thistles and brambles which is commonly set before them as the food 
and entertainment of their tenderest and most docible age.' And, 
after a couple of .centuries of progress, what is the outcome ? We still 
hear everywhere that the dead languages fail, because they are taught 
by obsolete and irrational methods, and it is stoutly claimed that all 
we need is their reformation. 

" But what mystery is there about these languages that their study 
should prove the great chronic scandalous failure of higher education, 
age after age ? There can be no reason in their constitution or pecu- 
liarities that should necessitate any such result. There has been a thou- 
sand times more practice in teaching them than in teaching any other 
languages ; the work of learning them is of the same kind as that of 
learning other languages, and they are said, moreover, to be the most 
perfect forms of speech, and in that respect would seem to have advan- 
tages over other languages. There is nothing exceptional in the pro- 



APPENDIX. 69 

cesses of their study. The meanings and relations of words have simply 
to be acquired, so that they can be used for the expression of thought. 
Dictionaries, grammars, literary models, abound, and experienced teach- 
ers superabound. And yet, with all these facilities, the study of dead 
languages has been the one pre-eminent and historic failure of the 
so-called liberal education. There is more repulsiveness in it and more 
hatred of it than any other kind of study, — mathematics not excepted. 
There have been more flogging, bullying, and bribery resorted to as 
incentives to classical study than to all other studies whatever. Both 
in England and in Germany the system has long maintained an exclu- 
sive ascendency by a barbaric discipline on the one hand, and on the 
other by all kinds of prizes, honors, and emoluments that could stimu- 
late selfish ambition, and which have been jealously withheld from 
modern studies. With a)A. these factitious stimulants to classical study, 
its failure has been so notorious that we cannot attribute it to any ac- 
cidental defects in the modes of its teaching. Nor can these defects 
be so readily repaired ; for no possible reform in the modes of studying 
the dead languages can alter their relations »to modern thought. It is 
here that we find the open secret of their failure. 

" Professor Cooke struck the key-note of this discussion when he 
remarked, in his article on ' The Greek Question,' in the last Monthly • 
' A half-century has wholly changed the relations of human knowl- 
edge,' and ' the natural sciences have become the chief factors of our 
modern civilization.' This change in the relations of knowledge, by 
which the sciences have become the great intellectual factors of 
civilization, has necessarily brought with it a corresponding revolu- 
tion in education. For the new knowledge did not originate by the 
old methods of study ; it came by new exercises of the mind, as much 
contrasted with previous habits as the greatness of its results is con- 
trasted with the barrenness of the traditional scholarship. The old 
method occupied itself mainly with the study of language ; the new 
method passed beyond language to the study of the actual phenomena 
of nature. The old method has for its end lingual accomplishments ; 
the new method, a real knowledge of the characters and relations of 
natural things. The old method trains the verbal memory, and the 
reason, so far as it is exercised in transposing thought from one form 
of expression to another. The new method cultivates the powers of 



yo APPENDIX. 

observation and the faculty of reasoning upon the objects of experience 
so as to educate the judgment in dealing with the problems of life. 
The old method left uncultivated whole tracts of the mind that are of 
supreme importance in gaining a knowledge of the actual properties and 
principles of things which are fundamental in our progressive civiliza- 
tion ; the new method begins with the systematic cultivation of these 
neglected mental powers. The old method has yielded to the world 
long ago all that it is capable of giving ; the new method has* already 
accomplished much, but it has as yet yielded but comparatively little of 
what it is capable of giving when it becomes organized into a perfected 
system of education. It is this new scientific method, based in nature, 
fortified in the noblest conquests of the human mind, and full of prom 7 
ise in its future development, that has become the rival in these days 
of the old system of dead-language studies. They have failed because 
they cannot hold their ground against the new competitor. 

" The classics are constantly defended because of their boasted dis- 
cipline, yet they have declined because of the growing sense of the 
weakness and inferiority of «the mental cultivation they impart. They 
are accomplishments for show, rather than solid acquisitions for use. 
The study of words, the chief scholarly occupation, is mentally debil- 
itating, because it leaves unexercised, or exercises but very imperfectly, 
the most important faculties of the mind, — those which can only be 
aroused to vigorous action by direct application to the facts of the 
phenomenal world. That classical studies fail here has been long 
conceded. Dr. Whewell declares that ' mere classical reading is a 
narrow and enfeebling education,' and Sydney Smith speaks of 'the 
safe and elegant imbecilities of classical culture.' A system charac- 
terized by feebleness and imbecility in its mental reactions is no prep- 
aration for dealing with the stern problems of modern life. More 
and more it is felt to be out of place, and is consequently neglected. 
No kind of culture degenerates so readily into stupid mechanical 
routine as that of language. Professor Halford Vaughn thus charac- 
terizes the effects upon the mind of our excessive addiction to lingual 
pursuits : ' There is no study that could prove more successful in pro- 
ducing often thorough idleness and vacancy of mind, parrot-like repeti- 
tion and sing-song knowledge, to the abeyance and destruction of the 
intellectual powers, as well as to the loss and paralysis of the outward 



APPENDIX. yi 

senses, than our traditional study and idolatry of language.' Very 
properly may it be said that our inordinate study of language is an 
idolatry of which the blind devotion to Greek is but the fetichistic 
form. The cause of the failure of the classics is, therefore, not be- 
cause a thousand years of experience with them has failed to give 
us good methods of study, but because, in the competition with modern 
sciences, as Canon Farrar remarks, ' they have been weighed in the 
balance and found wanting.' 

" It has been well said that ' the idea of training upon a foreign 
language had grown up in modern times. The Greeks did not train 
upon Persian or Scythian; they knew x no language but their own.' 
This is not only a fact of profound significance, but it is a crushing 
answer to the modern polyglot superstition. Everybody is recom- 
mended to study Greek because the language is so beautiful and per- 
fect. Obviously the true lesson is that the Greeks made it so because 
they were shut up in it, and £ ould give their whole power to its im- 
provement. Granting the unapproachable perfection of Greek litera- 
ture, and that the Greeks surpassed the world in philosophical acuteness, 
the invincible fact remains, that they expended no effort in the study 
of foreign languages, and common-sense declares that it was because 
of it. In his defence of the wholesale study of language, in the St. 
Andrew's Address, Mr. Mill encountered this perplexing consideration. 
Having pointed out the numberless advantages of a knowledge of many 
languages, and then having to explain how the Greeks succeeded so 
remarkably without any such knowledge, he is driven to the shift of 
suggesting that these Greeks were a very wonderful people. He says : 
' I hardly know any greater proof of the extraordinary genius of the 
Greeks, than that they Were able to make such brilliant achievements 
in abstract thought, knowing as they did no language but their own.' 
From which we are to infer that if these clever Greeks could have 
had a couple of dead languages to train on, and three or four living 
languages to expand on, their achievements would have been simply 
prodigious ! Another illustration of the power of fetich-worship to 
pervert the logical intellect ! " 

Quincy, Mass., January i, . 1884. 



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